Liz Magic Laser

In her latest work The Thought Leader (2015), a 10-minute single channel video, New York based artist Liz Magic Laser combines the format and particular uniformity of the TED conferences with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s dark novel Notes from the Underground (1864). A young boy, Alex Ammerman, recites Dostoyevsky’s text speaking in the most cheerful way about an individual on the margins of modern society and the effects modern life has on the human condition.

Laser’s hallucinatory investigative report explores Paris’s Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, widely considered the birthplace of modern psychology and neurology. Interviews with doctors, historians, clergy, and dance therapists reveal uncanny connections between the emergence of “hysteria” in 19th-century Paris and recent outbreaks of so-called TikTok tics.

Presents a distilled dialogue between the news media, embodied by a reporter on the scene (Elisabeth Weydt), and the public, represented by an actor in the role of the proverbial “little man” (Florian Kleine).

An operatic performance with libretto and choreography interpreted from scenes from soap operas, plays, movies, and reality television shows featuring characters expressing psychological crisis.