Corporate rave research

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
October 28, 2004

Corporated hands

Overarching theme is the corporate turn entertainment in the club and specifically techno industry has taken - underlying theme is that of the dance and a self expression personal to all - that happens in these spaces.

Having ventured through the club spaces, specifically techno clubs in Europe for the past 8 years, I have come to question why it has grown to become what it is today: a Mecca of controlled hedonism .

What makes a techno night, for ones who have experienced it, an unforgettable experience that makes you crawl for more? Is it the drugs you’ve perhaps indulged in, making you hit that serotonin and love high level, the (perhaps) deep conversations you’ve had with complete strangers, this ephemeral exchange with the other, or the pounding rhythm of the music and you, alone, dancing to its beating heart? Perhaps it is all of these above, perhaps none of them and you despise these spaces, have had terrible traumatic experiences of something else.

It is in its capital Berlin that I have explored this once called underground or counterculture scene, trying to find its wild/animal/fauve essence and wondered, how can this raving soul become a high paying entertainment industry? OR an adult playground?

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What happens when techno becomes corporate?

This exclusive, branded, normalized, monetised, hyped culture has taken on to standardize what it means to party in style, in the right way. Rules, regulations have been put into place in order for (controlled) decadence to happen, yet there are unspoken norms and rituals that live within its audience.

Why has Techno become a format of partying?

This work reflects an interpretation of this techno Mecca. It reveals an inner sensation of globalized dance. It is not a generalization on what it means to party, rather it is a reflection on the electronic dance party. It considers the observed reality of exclusivity, consumer entertainment, and conversations paying in loop. The sonic 4 channel speaker installation brings you think critically about your engagement within an exclusive space of entertainment. Are you an audience, an active participant, a voyeur, an indulger, a maker, a tourist?

Yes, this piece is a reflective process of my artistic research, questioning this industry, while acknowledging that perhaps, through repetition, differences occur.

As Mary Oliver expressed so truthfully in her 2004 Wild Deer poem, “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”.

Artist Vera Heindel is a gifted selector with flawless technique. Playing records in the way she does takes skill, yet the casual observer might not realize just how much. It's an ego-free method that puts music above showmanship. (Matt Unicomb/ RA)

Vera has recently commented on this corporatisation of dance culture, how the need for social media is used to promote a type of standardisation of electronic entertainment

This is a mix between my thoughts, the actual work presented and my research

Corporate Rave.
A sonic installation with 4 channel speakers, a dance floor, 2
collages and a leather booth to sit. All in a dark room. ESW 2023.

By muriel Lisk-McIntyre

Some of my notes on Techno:

Ancestral technologies embedded within techno if you go to its start - as underground resistance

Techno as a community builder - what are the spaces for these communities now?

Ritual rhythmic trance

Together experience vs individual experience
Rhythm journey - importance of rythme to connect (the dance)

- Techno: a continuation of the military complex
Techno as a format - dancing - hand gestures

Techno and more precisely electronic dance music being part of big institutions public programs

I was first hesitating on having two walls built to create a claustrophobic space for the viewer to experience this closed in club sensation. However, this type the installation would have not been nice to stand inside of while listening to the 8 minute sound piece, which is the main part of the work. I therefore created a space in which the sound could travel through, based around its journey.

The space I created at ESW, the one putting in context the 4 channel sonic installation, is remnant of the club space, la boite noir: dark, damp, mal lit with bright light bringing out the imperfections, cigaret traces, people talking with beers in their hands. A cringe leather booth, difficult to circulate around the dance floor...