Despina Rangou

‘The Future Will be Fantastic. Are your emotions helping or hurting you? You can choose who you want to be’. These are some examples of messages that overflow mass communication in our times, let this be on or off line. 

Nowadays we seem to have the choice of identity, sexual orientation, religion, our own bodies, and gender. From small, everyday things to fundamentals we are highly individualised, or at least we think we are. The way we make choices is ultimately linked to the way we form relationships with others and how we think others see us. There is an apparent paradoxical new self-made individual human who is on one hand free to create an identity from scratch, and on the other to follow an arbitrary popular model of who to be, deriving from celebrity culture accessible through our online virtual realities associated with social media, blogging sites and constant communication through our portable devices. We have reached a point where we complain about numerous emails, as if these notes are burdens we can’t cope with. We refer to our phones as if they are human beings claiming that they’re ‘dying’ when they run out of battery and we adorn them with decorating ‘skins’.

Do these choices offer us jouissance?

Jouissance is sometimes translated as ‘enjoyment’ but is not to be mistaken with the term ‘pleasure’, as it transcends beyond it, into an unbearable level of excitation. A triangular methodology translates an imaginary symbol into a signifier of the real. An installation situated in the Stevens building, allegedly called the Gabb Lounge, aims to explore this ecstatic notion of our modern society, through workshops, artifacts and video installations.