ENLIGHTENMENT MACHINE

ENLIGHTENMENT MACHINE

The Other Spaces Live Art group has become renowned for its performative enactments, where it embodies more-than-human phenomena and states. This time, the transformative exercises the group has developed study the most heightened form of human experience, the enlightenment.

Traditionally, that state of spiritual perfection has been described by words like awakening, happiness, freedom, joy, freedom, serenity, compassion, equality, emptiness, and wholeness, and it has been searched for within different traditions of meditation. All meditation is based on certain body techniques, which often are strictly codified and hard to learn and practice. At the same time, everyone has every now and then insightful moment, which, like enlightenment, may have a deep impact on a person´s life. Those ”little enlightenments” may occur for instance in nature, in art, while making love, giving birth, being drunk, or in other exceptional or extreme states.

Enlightenment Machine focuses on those momentary experiences, trying to find simple technical means for producing them alone or together, and over again. Could the spiritual quest become a matter of a new kind of imagination, experimentation, play and common invention? How to make it accessible and practicable for all?

Enlightenment Machine calls for the update of the modes of spiritual ascesis without banalizing them. At the same time, it challenges us to ponder our relation to the contemporary enlightenment industry, which works in conformity with the self-centered performance economy.