Yolanda's Meditation on line meditation

START MEDITATION

“Yolanda's Meditation” is the first experiment of net.based meditation and as well the very first net.art work by the italian group Coniglioviola / VioletRabbit.

The site - designed in Barcelona in 2001 - offers an unusual meditation path through the seven chackras, with the aid of hypnotic sounds and animations, and under the guide of a historical movie figure as your Yoga teacher

“Yolanda's Meditation” represents a digital reading of the oriental tradition of Chackras, which presents a perfect system of correspondance beetween the energy points of the à human body , vital functions, psychic functions, sounds, shapes and colors.

Through this system, Coniglioviola/VioletRabbit has created for each of the seven chackras some short animations which repeat in loop, using the colours and sounds indicated by the Yoga tradition.

Instead of the typical Buddha which appears in the traditional iconography, as our guide for this meditative/hypnotic path we find the Robot from Fritz Lang's movie "Metropolis". It's essentially the presence of this robot that indicates one main provocative/ironic purpose in this work which brings along - in an apparently paradoxical way - an inner spiritual event such as meditation on a computer screen.

However, the relationship with one's own computer has become more and more similar to the relationship with a part of the self: possibly an alter-ego, a digital unconscious. This may explain why nobody has cried shame, and why Yolanda's cybermeditation has been largely used by the followers of oriental meditation, as well as by many psychologists and hypnologists.

Another provocation is aimed at the net.art culture, which has identified a certain number of web sites which are artworks in themselves, but whose fruition and enjoyment is often limited to the devout followers of such a "new muse".

Yolanda's Cybermeditation, on the pretext of being a usable artifact, all the while taking advantage of the popularity of new age culture, has succedeed in reaching a wide audience, at least within Italy, and in bringing the net.art also outside of net.art itself.

In December, 2003, Coniglioviola/VioletRabbit has given life to a new version of this cybermeditation, now enriched with a new chapter, "Yolanda's Temple", in which quotations from "Metropolis" become even more evident.

The users/initiates now have the chanche to enjoy the meditation following a guided path, at the end of which, through a visual mechanism reminiscent of the one used in videogames, they are taken inside Yolanda's Temple.

Once inside the Temple, it is possible to enjoy a further level of hypnotic self-suggestion. By the end of the experience, each initiate is invited to fill in a form in which the target of one's own future trainings through this virtual meditation can be specified. Form results are automatically collected by an on-line database, whose content remains encrypted, completely unreadable by anyone. This database will thus become a sort of digital collective unconscious.