Insurrection/Fights on TV
Digital video, 5:00:00
2022
Insurrection/Fights on TV is a single-channel video work that explores relationships among the January 6th insurrection and the pageantry of reality TV fights. Composed of datamoshed archival footage of the January 6th insurrection and reality TV arguments, the video loops for a total of five hours: roughly the same duration of the insurrection riots. During the five-hour cycle, the video slowly transforms from footage of the Jan 6th riots to altercations that occurred on multiple seasons of the Real Housewives. Throughout this transformation, the riots and TV fights continually bleed into each other and oscillate among recognizable forms and abstract, undulating patterns of glitch. The video is accompanied by a soundtrack that slowly fades from audio taken from the insurrection to dialogue from the Real Housewives. This is further blended with dissonant noises created through manipulating analog tapes. By corrupting appropriated fragments of archival footage and TV shows, Lohmeyer presents a Buddhist approach to coping and overcoming anger experienced from current US politics and the indifference, apathy, and lack of empathy that seems all to familiar in late capitalism and post-truth society: a kind of miasma of entitlement instigated by Trumpian politics. Rather, through a meditative five-hour video feed, Lohmeyer suggests a way to confront and sit with anger in a positive light, observing it as an emotion that will inevitably pass and as an energy that has the potential to transform into something spiritually affirmative.