The Cool Couple - Karma Fails
“In the widespread consolidation of soft powers on the collapse of social contract, all problems become a personal test for the good life, while the global conflict for control is played through the use of memes, shitposting and nerd culture. We are taught to develop a deeper self-love while facing a catastrophe perhaps unparalleled in human history, living in a period of intolerable extraction, unequal human deprivation, multispecies extinctions, and blasted ecosystems.
Meditation perfectly fits the selfish ideology of wellness, where individual productivity and healthy living are status symbols, fueled by the trendy branch of wearable tech products. As Lordo Rinzler, founder of MNDFL, one of the trendiest meditation studios in NYC, says: “it’s no longer your spiritual friend saying you should try meditation, it’s your doctor.”
Now freed from any New-Age influence and its original pacifist ideology, today meditation is often supported by a rhetoric of employability-boosting and mood-hacking, practiced in harmony with the so called AirSpace aesthetics and Apple products’ design. It has become an effective biopolitical device, keeping a growing percentage of people busy in smiling at life while the world burns.
We started to “hack” meditation to create an infinite-renewable source of energy and a tool for critical thinking, to turn it into a language that helps focusing on and deconstructing the pervasive visual stereotypes of capitalism in the Anthropocene. This activity is promoted and performed through a fake meditation studio, called Meditation Is Visualization. Introducing people and art-professionals to critical visualization, we try to generate a viral and partecipative process of visual analysis in an epoch of rising fascisms driven by the visual.”