Cultivating the Witness

2018; Two-channel Audiovisual Installation; 25:00 Loop

This project was commissioned by curator Pennylane Shen and was shown at Parker Street Studios in Vancouver, BC in 2018.

In this work, the artist duo The Automatic Message continues their exploration into memory. Filmed in Goehring’s childhood home, the imagery and the audio composition calls upon those fledgling unbiased observations that one has as a child, those observations that become fixed in the mind as memories. These observations – these memories - are moments of absolute clarity where time ceases to exist and where one begins to cultivate self-awareness. Could these types of images be our vision of how we see the physical world after death? Traveling from memory to memory, reliving the very few moments of enlightenment that one can experience as a child?

“Witnessing yourself is like directing the beam of a flashlight back at itself. In any experience — sensory, emotional, or conceptual — there’s the experience, the sensory or emotional or thought data, and there’s your awareness of it. That’s the witness, the awareness, and you can cultivate that awareness in the garden of your being.” 

- Ram Dass