Yoga For The Eyes — The Digital Druids

2018

Yoga For The Eyes
Stills from HD Video / 2018
From Open Ear
Soundscape by Dreamcycles ︎

Yoga for the Eyes is an ongoing project by artists Coilin O’Connell, Eva Richardson-McCrea and Michelle Doyle. It has had two public outcomes, one at Open Ear Festival on Sherkin Island in Co. Cork and the other in a back garden of a rental property in Phibsboro in Dublin. This project uses archival footage, video collage, sculpture and community based interventions.
Yoga For the Eyes investigates the Free Party movement in Ireland, the right to assembly and the development of intentional communities.
Hippy communes paved the way for alternative lifestyles and complementary medicine, both of which were radicial in their early inceptions. More recently these ways of living have become increasingly commodified and centred on the individual over the collective. Alternatives to capitalism and industry are a capitalist industry.

Taking these cues, the artists built a pergola structure at Open Ear that would silently become an autonomous zone in the middle of a festival. Nothing was programmed in the pergola. Festival goers dragged benches over to it to sit around and contemplate it. After two days a speaker from the main stage was dragged to the pergola where a rave took place until at 9am the festival organisers reluctantly pulled the plug.

Pergola
Mixed Media Structure / 2018
From Open Ear, Sherkin Island.

Along with this structure, a 20 minute video collage also called Yoga For The Eyes, was screened at night. The contents of the video included footage of the Bean Field protests, Irish intentional communities along with Celtic/Esotheric symbols.
In the artspace, documentaries concerning two Irish intentional communities were shown, one a radical therapy commune and the other a New Age monastic community.
The Digital Druids also sold painted stones, soap, badges and tshirts from a giftshop.

Pergola and Giftshop
Installation / 2018
From Open Ear

Exhibition Text

What IS Yoga for the Eyes you may ask? For every question there is any range of answers, of which only you can fully realise…
Do you find yourself asking questions such as “Who am I?” “What am I?”
“What good have worldly possessions if I do not know how to be at one?”
“What good are material experiences if I do not have inner peace?”
It’s time to mix up the morning routine.
Skip the gym, forget the coffee.
In association with The Digital Druids, Yoga for the Eyes promises to awaken you to a whole new paradigm of health, wealth, happiness, success, prosperity and possibility. Yoga for Eyes is the promise that you can become something more - that there is a better way to live. This is the last moment of the way things used to be.

Through active participation in this visual retreat you will have the opportunity to create a whole new paradigm of the self - within you are the seeds of greatness."

Yoga for the Eyes II

Banners
Install Shots / 2018
From Yoga For The Eyes II (Dublin Edition)

A second iteration of Yoga For The Eyes took place in the back garden of a rental property in Phibsboro in Dublin. This brought the entire exhibition to a domestic setting. In the shed of the property documentaries and the Yoga For The Eyes video piece were screened on a loop. A new soundtrack was made to accompany the Yoga For The Eyes video by Irish sound artist, Dreamcycles.
This video is available on request.

Photos by Dylan, Cait, Coilin, Cliona, Chris, Harry and Denis.