As capitalism appropriated of it, that ancestral practice became a trendy tool to increase economical profit, labour exploitation, soldiers performances, to decrease the costs of welfare and insurance premiums. Now freed from any New-Age influence and its original pacifist ideology, today meditation is often supported by a rhetoric of employability boosting and mood-hacking, practiced in harmony with the so called AirSpace aesthetics and Apple products’ design. It has become an effective biopolitical device, keeping a growing percentage of people busy in smiling at life while the world burns.
Witnessing this phenomenon we asked ourselves if meditation could be “hacked” to create a tool for critical thinking, a language that helps focusing on and deconstructing the pervasive visual stereotypes of capitalism in the Anthropocene.
This activity is promoted and performed through a fake meditation studio, called Meditation Is Visualization. Introducing people and art-professionals to critical visualization, we try to generate a viral and partecipative process of visual analysis.