MARIOS PAVLOU
DINO TAROT | TIMELESS Pick a Pile Tarot Reading (for VIRGO Season) #ASMR
video installation, duration: 00:31:02, 2022
The video reciprocates the format of ASMR online Tarot Readings. These readings are titled as timeless, for whatever message the listener needs to hear at the time they watch the videos. Many people watch these online Tarot readings to escape from contemporary anxiety, stress and insomnia or because they are fascinated by mysticism and divination.
The deck that appears in the video is a hand painted dinosaur themed deck. One of the aims of creating the Dino Major Arcana Tarot deck is for it to appeal equally to all genders, and secondly to be a gentle and sympathetic introduction to the archetypical world of Tarot. Popular mainly with occultists like Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky in the early 20th century, the Tarot exploded into popular culture in the new age 70s with books like Stuart Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling, by cult filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky and surrealist artist Salvador Dali.
It is argued that each of the cards is one aspect of a living totality, a monument to the wisdom that speaks through the questioner. The discrediting of magic in general, and of the Tarot in particular, resides in the popularly held idea that the cards are used to foresee the future. For Jodorowsky, “one shouldn't speak of the future. The future is a scam. The Tarot is a language that speaks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you, yourself, become a swindler.”In the cult film, The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky said: “the Tarot will teach you how to create a soul.” Did all of us not come into the world with a soul, our own, ready-made?
The poems in the video reference the Dinosaur Game also known as the Google Chrome Dino. The game developers chose the dinosaur theme as a reference to the game's function, a joke that not having an internet connection is the "prehistoric ages". Dinosaurs existed before humans — and gender roles. They become a fitting subject for the times we are living in as gender norms, belief systems and ideas about how a society should function tumble down and are rebuilt. Minds and understandings should continue to change and to evolve.