Tag: meditation

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Changing Your Mind

Changing Your Mind is a new 50-minute crowd-sourced radio collage work by Vicki Bennett. It will be broadcast on Deutschlandfunk on 14 April 2023 at 0:05 (German time).

Meditation is a means of transforming the mind and has been practised for thousands of years. It encourages concentration, and clarity, and can have a transformative effect that can lead to a new understanding of life, and be used as a creative tool. This is a crowd-sourced audio collage by Vicki Bennett, where 48 participants respond to questions about the subject of meditation and consciousness and their experiences and relationship to this.

LISTEN:

List of participants:
Abhayadevi, Akashamitra, Rahne Alexander, Tim Atkins, Vicki Bennett, Marcus Boon, William Boon, Liz Bot, Leanne Bryan, Falco Carey, Jeff Carey, Leon Clowes, Stephen Coates, Will Edmondes, Diane Farris, Jem Finer, Louise Gray, Maya Gürbüz, Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, Phil Hallett, Kevin Hamilton, Dan Hayhurst, Mark Heath, Pea Hicks, Seth Horvitz, Peter Jaeger, Felix Kubin, Henry Lowengard, Tim Maloney, Lasse Marhaug, David McConville, Alex McKechnie, Irene Moon, Karen Oates, Kira O’Reilly, Ratnadeva, Sanghasiha, Saraka, Vic Scarborough, Nikolas Schreck, Adrian Shephard, Vanessa Sinclair, Sue Slagle, Suddhaka, David Toop, Vidyadasi, Pete Wallace, Richard Whitelaw

Vicki-Bennett-Changing-Your-Mind-Radio-Piece-V3-11-December-new-Broadcast-masterTranscript Download
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The Fundamental Questions book

cover photo

THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
new book by Gregor Weichbrodt, Vicki Bennett
Paperback & pdf, 569 Pages 

Buy the paperback book: http://www.lulu.com/shop/gregor-weichbrodt-and-vicki-bennett/the-fundamental-questions/paperback/product-21696219.html
You can now also purchase the book from The Wire magazine bookshop
Free downloadable pdf here or here

Update 2020: there is now a second edition to be available exclusively on site only at Hallwalls to coincide with Vicki’s solo exhibition First Person, Fourth Wall.

You may be familiar with the music, film, radio and stills work of People Like Us but this is the first step into this medium.  Although we’ve written essays, we’ve not written a book before.  And we still haven’t!  This content is sourced from online, developed online over the course of a 10-day conversation with Gregor Weichbrodt after we observed that searching for answers on a particular internet website possibly reflected and paralleled deeper questions within life…

Who am I?  Where do I come from?  What is my purpose in Life and what happens when I die? For centuries people have tried to come up with answers regarding the fundamental questions of life. Then the internet was invented and these questions have finally been answered – by users.

The Fundamental Questions captures them in an inspiring record of epic proportions where every individual verse becomes a mantra of a mind-expanding collective thought. It reminds us, that one single answer is never the answer.

Thousands of user profiles from the web were parsed, matched according to four questions and sorted in an alphabetical order.

People Like Us guested on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb on Friday 8 December 2017 talking about scrolling culture (and google minds!) in relation to the creative process and The Fundamental Questions book, playing a specially made 3 minute group reading made from this.
The Fundamental Questions read by Hearty White

The Fundamental Questions read by a computer
Featured in Journal of Writing in Creative Practice

The Fundamental Questions read at The Other Room
The Fundamental Questions read at Xing The Line
i am.

“I am the gambling of the fraudulent; I am the splendour of the splendid; I am victory; I am determination; I am the goodness of the good. I am a huge animal lover and love to spend time with my chinchilla and 2 pet rats.” – from the excellent piece of mashed-up uncreative writing called “The Fundamental Questions.” From Vicki Bennett and Gregor Weichbrodt. Further confirmation that the best use of appropriation in art is with a healthy dose of humor and joy. [And it comes in a paperback, almost the same size as your pink, half-read copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.] — Kevin Hamilton

Related item: I am that I am – A Twitterbot that combines verses from the Bhagavad Gita with user profile texts from the web. I am that I am @newmantras

In The Wire