Eddie Lohmeyer

Orlando, Florida, USA

STATEMENT OF ARTIST PRACTICE

Drawing from pop culture debris, occult mysticism, Zen Buddhism, and art history, Lohmeyer’s art explores the intersections among human perception, digital technologies, and modes of spiritual abstraction. Through experimental film, video installation, sculpture, and interactive methods, his media interventions aim to reconsider our habitual encounters with digital technologies through uncanny and often transcendent interfaces and screens. The playfully ironic encounters with these strange media forms unveil normal attitudes and perceptions toward digital technologies that have become a mundane co-extension of our bodies while questioning knowledge frameworks in contemporary networked culture through which we perceive and sense the world.

ARTIST BIO

Eddie Lohmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. His research explores aesthetic and technical developments within histories of digital media, with an emphasis on video games and their relationship to the avant-garde. His book Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding is now available through Bloomsbury Press. Using deconstructive approaches such as glitch, physical modifications to hardware, and assemblage, his installations, sculpture, and video have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently at 1308 Gallery at the University of Wisconsin, Ground Level Platform (Chicago, IL), the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2021 Milan Machinima Festival, and Arts Warehouse (Delray Beach, FL).

CONTACT

eddielohmeyer.com

LINKTREE | EMAIL

Examples of Collage in Motion

Visions of Mona

Constructed from layers of archival film, retro videogames, and generic stock footage, Visions of Mona uncannily combines pop culture fragments to imagine a desert vision quest. In a glitchy, looping vignette, Lohmeyer draws upon Eastern philosophies and glitch aesthetics to explore spirituality in the weirdness of late capitalism and a culture inundated by images, data, and algorithms. Here, Lohmeyer employs collage practices and the materiality of video to consider lived experience as a continuously fractalizing bundle of experiences, thoughts, and feelings that reflects impermanence through a digitally fabricated world.

Snake and Bake

Snake and Bake is a super-short video intended to be played in a loop as part of Hyperdimensional Non Sequiturs: an ongoing series of glitch artifacts in the form of GIFs and experimental shorts that explore technical processes of animation as well as psychedelic, kinesthetic impressions upon the body. Each artifact is produced via unique forms of creative coding, datamoshing, and/or special effects and combines movement from two seemingly different material objects (found footage, retro videogames, art historical images) to produce difference, uncertainty, and the new.

Shrine of the Eternal Continue

In Shrine of the Eternal Continue, Lohmeyer explores relationships among Eastern philosophies, glitch, and video game mechanics, employing techniques in AI, video performance, and data corruption. Thinking through Zen Buddhism and forms of spiritual iconography more broadly, the artist considers worldly experience and technology as mutually entwined and uses digital processes and bodily performance to highlight the miraculous interconnectivity of all things. Imagining his own body as an avatar and spiritual wanderer moving through simultaneously existing versions of reality, Lohmeyer performs a kind of ritual drifting through the inherent suffering of life: a joyful dance that resets itself within each moment.

Studies for Cosmic Transmigration

Studies for Cosmic Transmigration employs mixed media, expanded collage practices, video, and mask-making to explore processes of spiritual transformation within the strangeness of late capitalism. Drawing from conversations in Buddhism, Taoism, and other Eastern philosophies, the work explores questions related to what it means to look for spiritual enlightenment in a culture inundated by images, data, and algorithms that continually persuade us to shape and forge new kinds of bodily subjectivities and identities. Constructed in the shape of giant Tarot cards, Studies for Cosmic Transmigration consists of spiritual identities via different video channels.

zen_glitch

zen_glitch is an experimental film that explores Buddhist concepts of Saṃsāra as an aimless wandering through the ongoing cycle of life, death, and rebirth that characterizes material existence. Drawing from visual sources such as glitched videogames, vintage educational films and documentaries, corrupted art historical jpegs, and microscopic videos of plants, the film’s structure mirrors Saṃsāra. Just as one moves through mundane life filled with suffering and joy, zen_glitch guides the viewer through an unveiling wormhole that when played in a loop, reflects a cycle of sadness and joy, despair and ecstasy.