Machinic Elixir – Improvisation Two

Overview

In his practice as an experimental filmmaker, video artist and writer, Mochu engages with the life of fictional figures found in works of art and their encounters with esoteric philosophies and technological imaginaries.

Within an empire of shape-shifters and an atmosphere of decay, Machinic Elixir – Improvisation Two (2017) explores the possibility of immortality being both machine and edible substance. The multipart work draws from the history of 1960s counterculture groups and their appropriation of spiritual ideas as a phenomenon contemporaneous with the development of the personal computer and cybernetics. While computers proposed that machine activity could replace the mind, counterculture considered whether religious or mystical experience could be recreated through technical means as customisable ‘internal technologies’.

The video is set in the remnants of hippie trails in India. No longer as active as they once were, these routes still bear the signs of the techno-fictional, overlaid with ancient spiritual regimens. This decay of the ‘Empire of Equilibrium’, the once-aspirational-state of universal harmony exemplified by psychedelic posters, cheap reworkings of Surrealist paintings and local mixes of religio-techno-fusion music, forms the central audiovisual schematic of the project. The video is accompanied by a text piece titled On the shape of objects larger than the universe and other fears (2017).

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.