Shrine of the Eternal Continue
Video installation
2022
In Shrine of the Eternal Continue, Lohmeyer explores the nuanced relationships among Eastern philosophies, glitch, and videogame mechanics, employing techniques in AI, video performance, and data corruption. Thinking through Zen Buddhism and forms of spiritual iconography more broadly, the artist considers worldly experience and technology as mutually entwined and uses digital processes and bodily performance to highlight the miraculous interconnectivity of all things. Imagining his own body as an avatar and spiritual wanderer moving through simultaneously existing versions of reality, Lohmeyer performs a kind of ritual drifting through the inherent suffering of life: a bold, yet joyful dance that resets itself within each moment, within each breath of the here and now.
Using videogame tropes such as loops and two-dimensional side-scrollers, Lohmeyer imagines the mechanics of game engines as a metaphor for the cyclical nature of the world and the on-going reconstitution of experience that unfolds in the now. Right now! In the same breath, the artist draws a relation among the generative possibilities of glitch and AI as well as worldly experience as the expansion of everything and everywhere within the present moment, perpetually becoming the new. Lohmeyer expresses these concepts through collage and the fabrication of a personal shrine: one that breaks through existing religious paradigms through a heterogeneity of spiritual thought (Sacrament, Dharma, Zen, Samsara, and so forth).
Exhibited at:
"Glitches, GIFs, and Game Engines," South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN, November-December 2022