Loitering Theatre /

A Guided Meditation on the Machines

'A Guided Meditation on the Machines' is a film of a performative reading that took place in Dublin's Silicon Docklands. This guided meditation took place as part of Loitering Theatre's work as associate artists on the Prosperity Project with Jesse Jones/CREATE - Ireland's National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts.

The event was a precusor to the Wisdom 2.0 European event then to be held in Autumn 2014 at the Dublin European Headquarters of Google. Wisdom 2.0 promised to explore how to 'create real happiness at work' and to engage with speakers from around the world around 'mindful living and working'. The first Wisdom 2.0 event in the Bay Area saw Facebook's VP engineering describe how he had used his understanding of mindfulness to develop new systems of interaction like 'emotionflow'. Welcome to the ghost realms of Buddhism-lite. Where corporate mindfulness directs us to live in the now. Be here now and ignore the past. Be here now and never see your future. Every version of Empire needs a belief system to validate their rule

From our rooftop vantage point we are guided on a meditation (by actor Niamh McCann) to help us spiritually contextualize the odd presence of the 'stateless giants': Google, Facebook, Twitter and more in our small town on the edges of Europe. We join together in meditation to trace the movement by these corporations of vast amounts of information and unseen capital through our bodies and
the skies around us:

Feel the flow of data above the skies now. Karmic surge.
Feel the search requests of one billion people pass overhead as
they filter into the Dublin gateway of knowledge. Be present with it now - the weight around your body of the whole world's questioning

A moving paper fantasy. Let the Sunshine in. Breathe. Meditate.
Search Inside yourself

As a strange empathetic San-Francisco fog creeps in from the sea and begins to wrap the buildings around us in bay-area haze, we trace a sci-fi vision of the future - where Google's lead scientist Ray Kurzweil dreams of our artificial intelligence old age. Finally the singularity of man and machine; while Boston Dynamics' robot dogs guard the Google gateway of knowledge. This is the unseen future of data and capital that moves through Irish skies.

We ask our participants to direct their minds to the empty shells of the buildings of the financial crash that also surround us. We ask that they do not let them disappear from the mind's eye. The richest property owner in America is buying up anything of worth now in Dublin. They call him Darth Vader in business circles. This too is our sci-fi future. Meditate on it. Hold the vision. Beware of the monkey mind that is always in distraction.