Artistic research
While this holistic approach is an ultimate goal, I strongly believe that organising a party or running a club is not an individual affair. Due to its complexity, an organising collective supported by a community is vital. This needs time and goes beyond the scope of my master. However, it's feasible to extract specific elements from club culture and develop them further. That way, relieved of the burden of club culture codes, they can be developed within the wider scenographic spectrum. Ultimately, the results can be brought back into club culture or the broader field of performing and visual arts.
More specifically, I'm interested in the relation between disco-technology and humans. In a club, a social space, we tend to forget how much the environment is reliant on technology: synthetic sound and artificial illumination. The fact that we forget about this and that it feels natural means that the relation is well-balanced. But what if a ray of light (or sound) would be released from the environment and take the role of a participant? Are the spatial, sensorial and dramaturgical qualities the result of the technology itself? Or, are they merely the result of a (human) artistic decision? Or, are they created in the bodily experience of the participant? Instead of answering this kind of questions in a theoretical way, I investigate them through experimentation.
In this chapter, I will give a more detailed insight into my practice and methodology using two projects: Unighted and (Un)holy light. Both projects are developed in collaboration with Maarten Vanermen and have been on public display. Together we form the collective Club Efemeer. The first project is an applied research of a spatial arrangement of a club. The second project focuses on my extensive research on light and illustrates the aesthetics of Club Efemeer as well.