Err Anima Automata (Studies for Transmigration)

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Digital video (multiple channels), 2023-ongoing 

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Err Anima Automata is an ongoing series of 21 experimental films (coordinating to the Major Arcana in Tarot) that use expanded collage practices, human-AI collaboration, glitch, and video performance to explore processes of spiritual transformation and ritual within late capitalism. Drawing from conversations in Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism and other Eastern philosophies, Err Anima Automata questions what it means to look for spiritual enlightenment in a culture inundated by images, data, and algorithms that continually persuade ego to shape and forge new kinds of bodily subjectivities and identities. Presented as a video Tarot deck and bestiary drawing from esoteric and occult traditions, Lohmeyer uses his performing body as a vessel for communing with the metaphysical. Each of the 21 identities in the video series serves as a form of “spiritual technology” that encourages self-reflection of our own experiences, the expansion of consciousness, and potential for being present in this outrageously alive world. More so, Lohmeyer corrupts and glitches various generative AI engines to produce forms of destructive beauty, imagining contemporary technoculture as existing in cycles of death and rebirth, cremation and renewal. In Err Anima Automata, Lohmeyer takes on the forms of strange deities, demons, Yurei, and demigods to explore the digitally-mediated body as an impermanent, dynamic force, visualizing the post-human as a continuously fractalizing bundle of experiences, thoughts, and feelings through glitchy self-iterations.