VIDEOTANK #16: LESSONS ON LEAVING YOUR BODY
September 20 – December 9, 2017
Nadav Assor
Lessons on Leaving Your Body, 2014
Overview
Lessons on Leaving Your Body features Jake Wells, a professional tattooist, DIY drone builder, FPV (First Person View) flight hobbyist, and possibly the world’s first RC (Remote Control) Christian Minister. Wells shares some of his stories and ideas regarding the connection between religion, drone technology and his personal struggles. While flying, crashing and repairing his homemade drone in the area around his home in the Olympic Peninsula on the northwest tip of the USA, he recounts the story of his techno-spiritual awakening, from a life in which he felt remotely controlled by other forces, to his current state, in control, preaching and flying. Footage of Wells observing himself from the drone’s point of view using FPV gear, and shots reminiscent of romantic landscape paintings depicting the wider wilderness setting in which he resides, are woven together with monologues based on Wells’ own brand of theology, concerned with the connection between FPV flight, out of body experiences and the nature of the soul.
Artist
Nadav Assor employs a range of expanded media practices to explore the unstable condition of the hyper mediated body, the “new flesh”, constantly transformed by technology, in its immediate social, political sensory, and emotional environment. This is often done via lo-fi reenactments of appropriated military-industrial technologies, examining technological mediation as an essential and transformative human condition. For more than 10 years, Assor has performed and exhibited internationally in festivals, music venues, museums and galleries in North America, Israel, Europe and Asia. Some recent venues for his work include Hong-Gah Museum Taipei, Centre Arts Santa Monica Barcelona, Hyphen Hub NYC, Edith-Russ-Haus Oldenburg, Transmediale Festival Berlin, the European Media Arts Festival, the Soundwave Biennial San Francisco, Residency Unlimited NYC, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the Koffler Center in Toronto, Julie M Gallery Tel Aviv, Xuzhou Museum, China, and many others.
Documentation
Produced by the Foreman Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Sherbrooke and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec..
