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Online time capsule

Converted to physical tangible object- memories

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Rave ideas

Rave bible

Sound piece of publication

Text from publication be in the sound, visual in

Rave bible - no text

1. Enquiring into dance and music

2. Importance of clubbing

3. Love and hedonism

Notes from peers:

Photgroahy- visualise

Capturing movement

phtotgraphys seres - TYPOGLOGY

Capturing spirituality of dance floor

Take images of people and draw - two publications

Start with videos - how does it make feel

Publication could inform a video -

Play around with publication book binding

Fold out

Flip book : using life drawing ?

Gif

Movement through a publication

Life drawing - dancing, movement - piglets references

What medium captures movement better- charcoal, pencil, pen

Night fever

Think about specific things in clubs

Toilet queue

Waiting for drink

Dance floor

Spoking areas

Walk home

Publication - stepping into the club - open cover- walkinh through the door - club entrances

https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/tresor-door-berlin-humboldt-forum-exhibition-miscellaneous-190619

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The Religiosity of Rave Culture | Shelby Felder | TEDxNewCollegeofFlorida

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FAN ZINE is a tribute to the Japanese punk music fans, it aims to capture their spontaneous reaction to the music and contagious energy that free you momentarily from the constrain of everyday life.

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inc. is the world's largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists - artists' books or artists' publications. founded as a for-profit alternative arts space in 1976 by artists and artworkers

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printed matter reincorporated in 1978 to become the independent non-profit organization that it is today. originally situated in tribeca

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printed matter moved to soho in 1989 where for twelve years the book displays and artists¹ projects in the large storefront windows contributed to the artistic and intellectual vibrancy of the neighborhood. in february 2001 printed matter relocated to its current space in chelsea

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where it continues to foreground the book as an alternative venue for artists¹ projects and ideas. recognized for years as an essential voice in the increasingly diversified art world conversations and debates

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printed matter is dedicated to the examination and interrogation of the changing role of artists¹ publications in the landscape of contemporary art.

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Shiori Kawasaki - Fan-Zine - Printed Matter

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FAN ZINE is a tribute to the Japanese punk music fans, it aims to capture their spontaneous reaction to the music and contagious energy that free you momentarily fr...

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In this article I make connections between the Rave parties I love and the spiritual practices I have read about in books and magazines.

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Author's note: In this article I make connections between the Rave parties I love and the spiritual practices I have read about in books and magazines. My intent is not to argue equivalency. I am not an anthropologist, a scientist, or an academic. I am a hard-partying DJ who likes to read and a white transgender woman attempting to put her decades of experience in the electronic dance music scene responsibly into historical context. My analysis is both salutary and critical. [Content Warning: Triggering Language re: Transness, Racism, Colonialism, Intoxication and Self Harm.]
My father asked me once why I started going to Raves when I was so young. I told him that he didn't raise me with religion, so the raves were something like my church. In 1994, when I was 18 years old, I had a powerful set of experiences at warehouse parties in Chicago which would shape my life in ways I could never imagine. Nowadays I am what is called a "lifer"; someone who knows they are powerless to quit raving and resigned to that fact. For some club culture is perhaps mere entertainment, but for others like me, the music and the culture are essential and central in our lives. For the initiated, Raves are more than parties.

The events which shaped my definition of Rave were sweaty group experiences of sustained dancing under conditions that most would consider an ordeal. These parties went all night, sometimes for days. The excessive volumes were a selling point. (1) Polyintoxication and use of psychedelics were the norm. Alcohol was discouraged. For many of us, Raving was the first and perhaps only actual lived communal spiritual experience we ever had. In my case as a transgender woman, the Rave experience helped me dissolve the culturally constructed gender assigned to me and define my identity. In simple terms, raving helped me see myself and allowed me to participate in a community outside of the dominant society. I used it to find myself and my friends.

Trance Drumming & Durational Mixing
Ever tell someone you like house music and they respond in jest, "oh you mean, that boom, boom, boom music?" Even the most ill-informed critics of electronic dance music culture seem to understand that a repetitive drumbeat is at the center of Rave. It is the heartbeat of dance music. The bass drum is usually the loudest instrument in the mix on a dance record and at a party it can thump continuously without a break for hours (even days!) as DJs seamlessly mix records back and forth. Nowadays, a lot of popular music uses this beat, but that wasn't always so. In the late 1960s and '70s, it was the disco remixers and party throwers, Black, Latinx and Italian queers, who emphasized the four on the floor beat through drumming, sound system design, djing and remixing (2). The disco rhythm section was inspired by R&B and Latin rhythms (3). Central to the sound was the influential drumming and production of the Philadelphia team of Black American musicians known as Baker-Harris-Young, the true architects of the "four on the floor beat" as it is sometimes called, who were sought after studio musicians and toured with band MFSB and Vince Montana's Salsoul Orchestra (4).

In the early 1980s, when disco died in the States and the big studio production budgets disappeared, innovative Black musicians in Chicago, Detroit and NY started to use drum machines to create an even stronger and more highly synchronized bass drum pulsation without the need for human session musicians. The key music machines were the Roland 303, 808 and 909, which were originally designed as affordable rhythm and bass accompaniment devices for trained musicians who wanted to practice at home without the band (5). Black folks took this technology and repurposed it rather spontaneously. While drum machine music typifies '80s production in many styles, it was certain young Black house producers that stripped disco and electronic dance pop of its ornamentalism and focused their work almost entirely on repetition and trance tones. For an illustrative comparison, listen to Donna Summer's " followed by the first ever acid house record, Phuture's " I Feel Love" (6) Acid Traxx." Both use synths and a prominent four on the floor beat, but there is no melody in Phuture's 12-minute minimalist epic. The focus in Acid Traxx is the central beat and trance-inducing resonances. In a DJ's hands it is in a sense a tool, not a song with a chorus, verse and melody like most popular music.

There is a wonderful story which DJ Pierre, one of the original members of Phuture, has shared regarding the genesis of the house and acid scene in Chicago (6). Ron Hardy, the well-known legendary house DJ, played a lot of disco for his crowds and broke a lot of early house records. The first time he played Acid Traxx, it allegedly cleared the dance floor. As the story goes Hardy played Acid Traxx several times that same night and by the end of the party everyone on the floor was screaming, dancing extra hard and totally whipped into a frenzy by the track. It seems that what is now called "acid house culture" was sparked in this moment of transport and shared ecstasy.

According to commentators, the drum has "a role of the first importance" in ecstatic traditions including Shamanism (7). It is used for "Shamanic flight," to summon spirits, and to "concentrate and regain contact with the spiritual world through which [she] is preparing to travel." (8) It is the fast continuous beats which allow the participants to "experience non-ordinary reality" via a state of trance stimulated by rhythm (9). Although the science of trance drumming is underdeveloped and necessarily relies on testable hypotheses to advance its claims, there appears to be a connection between trance drumming and the brain's theta waves as measured on an EKG (10). Sustained repetitive drumming lowers the brain's operational frequency to 4-7Hz. The theta waves alter perception and cognition, allowing the practitioner to disconnect from ordinary reality and gain insight. Theta waves are connected with meditation, spiritual awareness, creativity, intuition, daydreaming and memories (11).

The drum was the center of my revelatory mystical experience in 1994. My best friend and I took LSD at a big Rave in Chicago. We danced into these huge speaker stacks for hours. Like the opening scene of the feature film 2001, we stared into the speakers like the monolith, looking for meaning in something we did not understand (12). As we danced, colorful symbolic geometries appeared in the blackness; self-transforming spinning mandala -like (13) forms. I had the feeling of flight, like I was at the party and somewhere else at the same time. After the party we were still tripping hard as we rode home in the back of a minivan. The air-conditioning was blasting and we started hearing the thump of the bass drum from the party in the oscillations of the fan and its motor. A modulated noise source like an air conditioner will sound like a musical pulsation if you listen to it long enough with the right focus. In the moments of clarity which followed, my friend looked at me wide-eyed, smiled and proclaimed it "the Motherbeat!"

It is difficult to put into English this part of the experience because what happened in that moment was a kind of gnosis (14) , a moment of pure understanding between us and the world. I saw in that moment that the music was all around us. I understood that the beat which drives our music is something far more fundamental and mysterious than an ornament of culture. That there is something nurturing, healing, and nature-connected inside sound made even through "artificial" processes. And that the music could be used to accomplish a feeling of oneness. I saw the powerful illusion of culture for what it was, a gloss or artificial landscape through which we filter our actual subjective experiences. While drugs were a factor in my experience (and an important one as I will endeavor to explain below), the drumbeat was necessary. It was our conduit to the Other, the Mystery at the center of being.

The average length of a pop song is three and a half minutes, and that number appears to be shrinking (15). Compare the length of a popular song to a DJ mix which can flow for hours without interruption. Listening to durational music requires concentration and focus. Listening to music in this way can be seen as a meditation of sorts which leads to a heightened sense of mindfulness. Experimental 20 th century composer Pauline Oliveros is perhaps most famous for her spontaneously generated compositions and ensemble performances inside a giant concrete underground cistern-a 2-million US-gallon empty underground water tank with a 45 second reverberation time (16). Her process of intense listening to all sound, not just "musical sounds", enabled her to descend into the enclosed cavern with her friends and play the reverberations in the chamber as an instrument. On the recording, she transforms her beloved accordion into something beautifully unrecognizable using nothing more than a few microphones and the acoustics of the cistern. Oliveros described the technique of what she calls "Deep Listening"as such:
Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through Deep Listening. (17)

Psychedelics - Democratizing the Subjective Religious Experience
When I give presentations on my Rave experience, one of the first questions I am asked is, "do you need drugs to have the mystical experience you describe?" The simple answer is "no." Anthropological evidence supports the conclusion that ecstatic states of trance can be accessed through various means. A principal authority relied upon in this article for its summary of ethnographic fieldwork, Mircea Eliade's 1964 treatise "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy," contains numerous examples of spiritual traditions involving trance that do not rely upon psychedelics (20).

In fact, for Eliade, the use of psychedelics is viewed as a "crude" and "decadent" means by which to access the trance (21). For example, he views mushrooms use as a lazy form of shamanism in which practitioners become decadent, favoring the ease of the intoxicant over the hard work of other more powerful (sober) healers. Scholars like Eliade bring their misconceptions and prejudice with them as they assess the field work. I disagree with the argument that the use of psychedelics is in some way "decadent", lazy or unnatural for the reasons below.

While I expect many folks would find the notion of a teenager stumbling onto a mystical experience through drug culture irreverent, irresponsible or even disrespectful, my testimony is that these substances when combined with the intense drumming of a Rave, had the power in my life to produce a life-changing subjective spiritual experience (24). The focus at a Rave should be on harm reduction, not on dismissing the content and the very real importance of these subjective experiences in the lives of individuals and communities.

Psilocybin is the psychedelic component of "magic mushrooms", including the popular Psilocybe cubensis . There are at least 20 completed or pending scientific studies of Psilocybin for therapeutic use (25). This research, however, is primarily a recent phenomenon. At the time I started Raving, research into these substances was effectively banned. In 1994, talking about these subjects openly was a risky choice. There was almost no mainstream discourse about these substances that wasn't utterly infected with the false ideologies of the Drug War. In 2018, Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence was a New York Times #1 Bestseller. As it stands now, there is considerable scientific and clinical support demonstrating that psychedelics, in an ideal set and setting (26) , can be powerful healing medicines.

MDMA and the Culture of Ecstasy
I first came across the idea of a Rave through media in the early 90s. I was drawn to Raves by the descriptions of these futuristic hippie gatherings circling through the popular media. The truth is that I was being sold a Eurocentric version of a Black gay dance culture that erupted from the very town I considered home, Chicago (27). The spread of House culture is inexorably linked to colonialism and colonialist histories. This fact fuels very legitimate scrutiny and challenge over white power structures in the electronic dance scene some 35 years after Ron Hardy put his dancefloor in a trance for the first time with "Acid Traxx." MDMA, the drug known as Ecstasy, also played a significant role in the spread of house music outside of the gay Black culture from which it spawned.

According to MAPS, MDMA may have the following potential: We are studying whether MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can help heal the psychological and emotional damage caused by sexual assault, war, violent crime, and other traumas. We are also studying MDMA-assisted therapy for autistic adults with social anxiety, and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for anxiety related to life-threatening illnesses.

As a trans queer person who has experienced traumas, I found the oneness and ego loss I experienced at raves on MDMA extremely healing. The feeling is like a kind of universal empathy which extends to people you don't know, people different than you, and importantly yourself. The impact when you are dancing is an openness to the emotional content of the music and a feeling of oneness with the people around you. That is the ideal of dance music, as imperfect and flawed as it is in actual execution because of power structures, inequality, racism, sexism, ableism and transphobia. These structures exist even if it feels like they fade away in the mental state catalyzed by the drug. Accordingly, for someone who isn't grounded in radical politics, MDMA could look like a "cure-all" for society's ills. As I have learned, the drug is no panacea, but MDMA does offer a glimpse of an improbable utopia whose lasting spiritual resonance can be a motivational force for change, healing and growth.

The reason I think MDMA is so powerful in the context of Rave culture is that it creates a sense of community on the dancefloor. Ecstatic rituals in most cultures appear to center around communities. The ritual serves a myth-making function for the group and solidifies community values. It is axiomatic that having intense experience with others binds you to them. In many cultures, specific rituals signpost coming of age and maturity. Personally, I have always felt like an outsider in the dominant society. I generally feel unsafe when I am around cisgender people, unless they are my most trusted allies and friends. For the set and setting of a Rave to be a positive experience for me, I needed to feel a base level sense of safety, belonging and acceptance. When on Ecstasy (if people were being descent, the party was not triggering, and everything was going okay), the things which divide us were in some sense visible as constructed modalities of oppression, violence, capitalism, and prejudice. So, on the drug I was able to relax enough to let the music into me and to dance the way I wanted to without fear of reprisal. My whole life I have been punished by others for my femininity, in ways ranging from gentle correction, to distrust, to outright bullying. Before coming out, suppressing and managing that aspect of self was a full-time job outside the Rave. Inside the music it felt different. I felt a sense of freedom, connection and wonder.

When people who experience marginalization by the dominant society feel unsafe at Raves or experience on the dancefloor the types of harassment they face in their everyday lives, it is a kind of blasphemy because they are in so many ways the source of the music, energy, and inspiration that fuels the scene. When these things happen to a person while they are under the influence of a drug like Ecstasy, the trauma can multiply because they are in an extra vulnerable, ego-dissolved state. People who throw events have a tremendous responsibility to the people who come. Anti-harassment policies are a lure on a stick if they are not enforced. For example, how is a BIPOC person supposed to have a positive spiritual experience at a Rave when white people are allowed to dance in feather headdresses and dashikis at festivals without challenge? How can a party claim to honor Rave if the promoter is not concerned about making the experience accessible to someone with mobility issues? The simple truth is that many of the players in the scene are rich white men with only the most tangential relationship to the communities of individuals existing on the margins of the dominant society who use the music to create art, find their friends, and heal.

Alcohol
When I was in High School and I started raving I associated drinking with the jocks who bullied me (Do not feel sorry for me-a phoenix rose from those ashes!). I remember seeing alcohol at only one Rave I attended between the years of 1994 and 1996. I was told by other Ravers that hard drinking mixes horribly with psychedelics and MDMA. Drinking makes you feel more powerful and less empathetic. Whereas the drugs we previously discussed are used to dissolve the ego, alcohol does the opposite. That is probably why people like drinking so much in this society. Ego death is an incredibly vulnerable experience but drinking makes you feel invincible.

During the height of Rave culture, the jam-packed Hacienda club in Manchester had to close, in part, because everyone was so loaded on "E" that the bar never made money off alcohol (32). Nowadays almost every event I attend is fueled and financed through alcohol. My early Rave friends and I believed that drinking dulls the ecstatic mystical component of ecstasy and transforms the drug into more of a speedy deliriant. As I conducted research for this article, I could not find a single citation for this concept because the discussions I found center around the dangers of mixing alcohol with ecstasy, not the impact that alcohol has on the healing component of the substance. It appears that early Ravers had started to define a set of cultural rules around Ecstasy use which were quickly eroded. In my own story, by the late 1990s my focus had turned to clubs and I started drinking at events. I will address this time in my life in more detail in the next section of the article.

Ordeal - Sleep Cycles, Polyintoxication, and the Hardcore Ethos
Many spiritual practices involve some type of ordeal. Fasting, exposure, and ordeal poisons are all well-documented techniques. An ordeal in a spiritual context can have multiple purposes, but it can be said as a general matter that a person puts their body through an ordeal in order to quiet the ego and focus the mind. In some cultures, the ordeal is a rite of passage. For many, Raving would seem like the opposite of an ordeal or ascetic spiritual practice. What does a fun night out have in common with a set of hard dedicational spiritual practices focused on reaching higher states through self-denial, overcoming pain and doing without? Indeed, many ravers have expressed to me over the years their belief that Rave is hedonic; a culture obsessed with seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering. And for some it is. But in my experience, ordeals are one of the most significant components of the spiritual Raver's toolkit. A Rave goes all night, into the morning. It can last for days. Ravers disrupt their sleep cycles as part of their regular routine. Fasting during events is commonplace, although I suspect most Ravers don't realize this is part of the magic. By way of comparison, Ayahuasca preparations are traditionally administered after a period of fasting to prepare the body for the experience. Terrace McKenna advised that mushrooms should always be taken on an empty stomach, so the trip comes on fast and strong. Ravers will dance for hours without food, and some never take a break. By the end of the party, a dancer is often dehydrated, empty and sleep deprived, while at the same time elated, ecstatic, and renewed.

Many Ravers repeat this process every week, year after year, some for life. The toll on our bodies is hard. For a special group known for better or worse as "speaker freaks," we damage our bodies with some degree of intentionality by placing them directly in front of the speaker stacks or inside the bass enclosures. The volumes at parties are undeniably too loud for safe listening, even with ear protection (which I of course recommend because it is at least safer ). But many Ravers want to feel the Motherbeat move through us. We want to feel the wind coming out of the bass traps. We want to feel a sense of purification and renewal as our bodies are both punished and nourished by the soundwaves. We want to stare into the speakers like an oracle, beholding the sound and allowing a process of synesthesia to form visualizations in the black void, a perfect canvas for hallucinatory experiences.

I hesitate to write the next section because it is not a practice I encourage. For many Ravers, poly-intoxication is the norm. While I abandoned this practice years ago, for much of my time as a clubgoer, I would experiment with combinations of drugs, some of them dangerous (35) . While my first few years of Raving were focused on Ecstasy and LSD, drug combinations became normalized through clubbing and I eventually moved on to other things. Now when I go to a festival or club, many dancers have been drinking and taking a cornucopia of substances over the weekend. It isn't unusual to see a bag of molly in one hand and drink in the other. At one point in my life a night could include heavy drinking, cocaine, and MDMA. To be honest these were difficult times for me and it is hard to write about, but I do not honor my true spiritual experience as a Raver if I do not discuss it. This is how I see it : I broke my body down so much during this period in my life so that I could in some sense destroy myself. In moments alone in delirium near death, I knew that the only way I could continue to live is if I let myself live an open life as transgender person. I had to let my culturally constructed adult persona die so I could come out and rebuild. In those states of delirious polyintoxication and disembodiment, I remember looking in the mirror and seeing myself. That might seem contradictory, but I think for a transgender person a certain degree of dissociation can be a tool. Everything had narrowed to a single point of focus that I could not ameliorate with intoxication. This drug induced delirium let me engage with my transness in ways I had never allowed myself. I was hiding and had withdrawn from every aspect of my normal life. I hit a breaking point, and after almost 4 decades on this planet I came out. As much as I never want anyone to go through what I went through-or what I put my loved ones' through-I know that without these experiences, you would not be reading this today. A more nurturing scene focused on integrating the Rave experience into everyday life, much in the way an Ayahuasca ceremony is a community experience which starts before the event and continues after it, might have been a gentler path.

Private Healing Rituals Create Healing Art for the Dance Floor
Much of the discussion of Rave centers around the parties and the communities that gather before them (36) . But so much of electronic dance culture is informed by private experiences. My DJing, which in the last 2 years took me to 30 countries, reflects the thousands of hours I spent alone or with a friend, mixing records at home, dancing or not, adorned, and experimenting with substances. My music production reflects decades of solitary work which I started in my early teen years. Before I came out, the only time I would wear the clothes I wanted to wear was during these private rituals. For years I would put on a dress and let the power and beauty of the act be expressed in my music and the movements of my body. Eliade's definition of a healer suggests a connection between magical healers and the electronic musicians I know. The "magician, the medicine [person] or Shaman is not only a sick [person], [they are] above all, a sick [person] who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing themself." I believe that the power of the healing art presented at a Rave represents the private healing work of individuals.

Adornment, Transness, & Transubstantiation
Costume and adornment are a part of the healers' toolkit in many cultures. According to Eliade, on the most basic level, the costume "represents a religious microcosm qualitatively different from the surrounding profane space." (37) For example, in certain cultures healers adopt the costume of animal gods or other spirits for rituals. For its part, "the costume transubstantiates the shaman, it transforms her, before all eyes into a superhuman being." (38) Transubstantiation is a ritual act which changes the form or substance of (something) into something different. It is in this context that anthologists such as Eliade point out the power of "transvestite", "androgynous" or "feminized" healers cross-culturally. (39) For a white European rationalist scholar like Eliade, would a 21 st century trans woman's act of wearing a dress during a ritual be in effect a magical mask? (40) It is a strange and triggering experience to read about people who might have been like me in some deep sense described in this way. However, we do not know these people being talked about. Gender is culturally constructed so we cannot really know how these people saw themselves. Were Eliade's descriptions of these healers based on how he viewed gender, how they saw themselves, or how they were viewed by others in their community? These healers might utterly reject my understanding of my experience of gender or tell me that it simply doesn't apply to them. They might say Eliade is basically correct in his assessment of their identity and role in culture.

For me, my expression of gender is not a mask-many transgender friends whom I've had conversations with also share this feeling. While I am and always have been a transgender woman, do people view my simple act of getting dressed for a show as an ecstatic technique of transubstantiation by which I magically become a symbol of something I am not? If I became, in some sense, magical when I wore dresses and make up, it was because I was disrupting power systems, transcending cultural limitations, and being myself. It was like letting out a power that was already there, not manifesting otherness through an act of transubstantiation. I do not view myself as transcending my nature, I view myself as transcending cultural programming and ideologically infected materialist models of gender and the body. It is, however, undeniable that my personal and radical understanding of my transition as primarily a social process is not in-line with the view of gender held by most of the people coming to my shows. Therefore, it is likely that outsiders to the experience view transgender DJs and musicians as performing in some sense a symbolic and/or radical act of transubstantiation.

I have viewed my success over the last few years as a transgender DJ and producer as a sign of positive social change. While that might be true in some respects, I am struck by the fact that I might have been drawn to DJing because of its connection to a traditional social role held by people that had in some sense an experience like mine. It is important to note in this context that the healer is a marginalized character. (41) For some healers who are touched by femininity, Eliade coldly posits that they "chose [...] suicide." (42) According to him, the other option is "initiation." For the manang bali , the "command" to-in some sense-transition gender roles is accepted after it is received in dreams. For the Chukchee, the "command" comes from a ké let (spirit) which speaks from the body during an ecstatic trance ritual. (43) Could my perception of the beat in the air conditioner as "Mother" (a feminine beat) have been connected to my experience as a transgender person?

Glossolalia, Sound Poems, and Samples
While there are dance tracks which contain pop vocals, the typical house or techno track contains disembodied voices or no voices at all. Unlike Rock 'n Roll, in which the personality of the vocalist is a major focus of the work and how it is presented (marketed), in house music the voices are often sampled and manipulated beyond recognition. Ravers make little jokes about what they think the voice is saying in a track because there are inevitable disagreements and we know that what we hear on a dancefloor can have little or no relation to the actual source of the vocal. For one commentator, this is a "Sonic Rorschach," named for the well-known inkblot used in psychotherapy (44). Through the process of listening the original meaning of the vocal is obscured in favor of the listeners' subjective interpretation. The manipulation of voices allows Ravers to view the content of our psyche as a reflection of what we hear in the music.

For the members of Dada, a European avant-garde art movement of the 20 th century, sound poems, or "poems without words" were a useful way to destroy everyday language and return the voice to its pre-cultural, irrational, feeling-toned meaning; like a baby gleefully chirping away without syntax. Their poems were a metaphor for the devastation caused by WWI and a criticism of the deceitfulness of language and society. In a number of well-documented spiritual traditions, unknown tongues, so-called "glossolalia", have a similar function of freeing the voice from cultural constraint. For example, in Pentecostal traditions, some members speak in glossolalia during the most intensely ecstatic climax of a religious ritual. The speech of an unknown language signals the transition of the speaker out of the cultural mode and into the presence of the holy spirit (45). It is notable that high doses of psilocybin and DMT can also stimulate a form of glossolalia during intoxication. Dance tracks often contain reorganized words or partial phrases without syntax. A lovely example is the "The Dub of Doom" mix of "Push the Feeling On" by Nightcrawlers. Despite the fact that the song has no complete words or syntax, the reorganized nonsensical vocal hook propelled the song from underground status to a worldwide radio hit.

As a trans person I have found a lot of freedom in the vocals of dance music. And that freedom extends beyond a spiritual release from syntactical meaning. Because so many of the records I play contain sampled voices, there is an irreconcilable ambiguity as to the gender of the speakers. For example, a voice could sound "male" to the listener, but without asking the vocalist their gender, how do we know? The voice could have been manipulated using pitch and time techniques. The original singer could be a trans woman. It is like the music is a reminder not to make those associations and assumptions against people you don't know, or against people who are not there to speak for themselves. I would like to live in a world in which people do not assume they know my gender based on a crude formant analysis of my voice. It is a wonderful experience to play records containing different voices and mix them all together. Through sampling and collage mixing techniques, the relationship of gender to voice becomes unhinged.

A View Towards the Future
Throughout this article I have proposed points of connection between Rave and other spiritual rituals and practices. The spiritual toolkit of Rave is an important part of why Ravers seek out these parties to heal. Unlike the other spiritual practices identified in this article, Rave is in its infancy. The energy sparked in the Black gay Underground clubs in the 1980s was quickly commodified and appropriated. The festival and big club culture which dominates the dance music scene today has adopted an "entertainment" model of raving with big personalities, flashy stages, corporate sponsorships, and a predominance of white straight artists in the spotlight. While many of the ecstatic tools of Rave are still present at these commercial events, we honor the roots of the scene by challenging the current status quo.

The music remains a powerful tool for transcendence, but the scene cannot harness its full healing potential without strong measures in place for harm reduction and anti-harassment. Intoxication is a free-for-all at many events. In this respect, the scene couldn't look more different from a traditional spiritual ceremony utilizing intoxicants in which there is a cultural tradition of using the substance and great care is taken by practitioners to train in making preparations, picking plants, and dosing. Similarly, MDMA will be approved by the FDA, if at all, as part of a therapeutic complex, which includes an intoxication experience guided by a counselor.

Enforcement regimes have made it challenging for promoters to offer drug testing, but more and more events are taking on the legal risk. Groups like Dance Safe offer drug testing and groups like the Zendo Project offer counseling on-site for individuals having difficult experiences on psychedelics and other intoxicants. An Ayahuasca ceremony might give rise to a very challenging experience for an individual, but the practitioner (Shaman) who gave the medicine trains for years on how to help the individual through it. The spiritual lesson is an act of integration. For Ravers like me who set-out to crack themselves open using the available toolkit, integration could help prevent future self-harm and moderate attempts to reintegrate these experiences into everyday life. Anyone throwing parties can start to educate themselves and others involved by taking the online training in handling difficult experiences that is offered by the Zendo Project.

***

While club culture is entertainment for many, for certain people who seek out the experience, I hope I have demonstrated that it is so much more. It is hard to imagine my life without the music, without the special group of friends I have become close to through the music, and without the routine of sweating it out at a party. I continue to use mushrooms as a tool for transcendence, connection, and creation because I continue to get a lot from these experiences, and, after all, ecstatic healing is not a one-time thing. A lifetime of Raving might be hard on the body, but it is easy on the soul. My hope for the scene is that it will work to harness its healing potential in a way that respects the roots of the scene and the people who rely upon these parties as an essential ritual in their lives.
End note: I would like to thank my partner, lover and friend, Q, who offered valuable insight and suggestions that were incorporated into this work. Top illustration by Samantha Garritano

Footnotes
(1) For example, Ravers attending "Pollination" on May 21 st , 1994 were invited to "Frolic in the Phunk-E Phresh 40 K Watt Flowerbed of Bass." See flyers from the Midwest Rave Scene collected at http://www.self-titledmag.com/yann-novak-feature-needle-exchange-mix/ .

(2) See, generally, Lawrence, Tim, "Love Saves the Day", Duke University Press, 2003 at pp. 87-104.

(3) Simón, Yara, " Id . My Puerto Rican and Mexican grandmother always use to tell me I am "Latin." As a white woman of mixed ancestry who has used music to try to connect with this part of herself and family history, I have mixed feelings about the term "Latin American" because it is Eurocentric, and as such can be viewed as negating indigenous family histories. See Hispanic vs. Latino vs. Latinx: A Brief History of How These Words Originated ".

(4) Lawrence at pp. 199-124.

(5) See Roland advisement featuring keyboardist Oscar Peterson.

(6) Propellerhead's See Interview with DJ Pierre.

(8) Id .

(9) Henderson, Katie, " Shamanic Drumming ".

(10) See Pengelley, Heather, " What's the Science Behind Shamanism ", July 9, 2020 (collecting and summarizing available research).

(11) See " The Science of Brainwaves, the Language of the Brain ".

(12) As a child this imagery filled me with a sense of wonder, as an adult I recognize that the costumes used do not accurately reflect the human timeline.

(13) Mandela is the Sanskrit word for "Circle." "In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of practitioners and adepts, as a spiritual guidance tool, for establishing a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. In the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Shintoism it is used as a map representing deities, or specially in the case of Shintoism, paradises, kami or actual shrines." Quoting Mandala . I have not found a word in English which describes what I see in a trance state, so I use the term Mandala illustratively here. I do not intend to imply that my experience as a Raver is an alternate path to the realities accessed by these religions. There may in fact be some connection but it would be naïve and appropriative for me to assume the content of the experience is the same.

(14) "Gnosis" is the Greek word for "knowledge." It used in the context of understanding spiritual mysteries.

(15) "The average song length on the Billboard Hot 100 has decreased by 20 seconds in the past five years. Songs now average 3 minutes and 30 seconds." Sanchez, Daniel " Pop Songs Have Become Significantly Shorter Over the Past 5 Years ", January 18, 2019.

(16) Oliveros, Dempster, Paniotis, ". See also Deep Listening", New Albion, 1989, see here .

(17) See https://news.rpi.edu/content/2016/11/30/remembering-deep-listener-pioneer-pauline-oliveros .

(18) The typical party is very hot. I call the wetness that drips from the ceiling "Rave Rain." A raver need not dance to sweat. The development of so-called "Magical Heat" is technique in many spiritual practices. , Rhythm Section's 1992 Hardcore anthem " See , generally , Eliade at 474-475. Dance music samples and memes are replete with reference to internal heat. See , e.g. Burnin' Up ".

(19) For example , during a traditional Ayahuasca ceremony, the healer plays a rattle (which serves the same purposes as the drum) and moves about the circle, however participants often remain seated or otherwise stationary during the ritual. The participants focus on the sound, visuals and song of the Icaro , but do not necessarily move or dance.

(20) See, e.g., Eliade, p. 217, discussing traditions among the Tatars and Buryat.

(21) Eliade, p. 223.

(22) Compare these substances to the psychedelic Ayahuasca , which is an indigenous technology. Healers train for years to properly prepare the Ayahuasca brew from plants. I have never seen an Ayahuasca preparation at a Rave.

(23) Barker, Stephen A., " N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an Endogenous Hallucinogen: Past, Present, and Future Research to Determine Its Role and Function ".

(24) See Eliade, pp. 220, 223, 228, 278, for examples of cultures which use mushrooms in ecstatic rituals.

(25) See the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research) website.

(26) "Set and setting" is psychedelic terminology which acknowledges that a user's environment ("setting") and current state of psyche (mind-"set") have a tremendous impact on the content of the psychedelic experience.

(27) See, e.g., the previously cited interview with DJ Pierre.

(28) Available here.

(29) See " MDMA (Ecstasy) Abuse Research Report ".

(30) The legislative, executive, and judicial response was to vilify the Raves and make it very hard and extra dangerous for Ravers to conduct their rituals. For example, the Chicago Rave Ordinance made it illegal for parties to go past 2 a.m. without a highly restrictive Public Place of Amusement license. The Ordinance allows fines of up to $10,000 for promoters, venue owners, AND the DJs. Obejas, Achy and Townsend, Audarshira, " See Raves Rock On, Laws or Not , " Chicago Tribune, May 22, 2000.

(31) See August 26, 2017 MAPS Press Release.

(32) Tony Wilson, "24 Hour Party People" FAC424 (2002).

(33) Production House (1992) . Nino is the production alias of Terry "Juice" Jones, one of UK Hardcore's most transcendent and amazing artists.

(34) Communique (1994), available here.

(35) For example, Cocaethylene (CE) is a toxic and dangerous metabolite that is formed after simultaneous consumption of cocaine and ethanol. article titled " See Patients with detectable cocaethylene are more likely to require intensive care unit admission after trauma ", Sept. 18, 2009.

(36) A thanks to my dear friends over the years who I played with during private sessions!

(37) Eliade, at p. 147.

(38) Eliade, at p. 168.

(39) See , e.g. , Elide at p. 125 n. 36, p. 258 (collecting examples from the Chuckchee, Kamchadal, Asiatic Eskimo, Korak, manang bali of the Sea Dyak, Patagonians, Araucanians, Araphaho, Cheyene, Ute).

(40) Id.

(41) See, e.g ., Eliade at 351, discussing the "mockery" of shaman who dress and live the lifestyle of a woman outside of the ceremonial context.

(42) Eliade, at p. 258.

(43) Eliade, at p. 255.

(44) EMD, " Sonic Rorschach: Dance Music as Collage and Its Dancing Subjectivities ".

(45) See , generally , Glossolalia .

(46) Mr. Fingers, " Can U Feel It? (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mix) ", Trax Records.

(47) See Who Sampled entry here.

About the Author
Eris Drew is a DJ, producer and trans ecstatic from the prairies of Illinois, USA. She runs the T4T LUV NRG recording label with her loving b2b partner Octo Octa. Eris is also a recording artist for Naive Records out of Portugal and conducts the Psychedelic Rites of the Motherbeat at various locations, including Pittsburgh's Hot Mass, TUF in Seattle, and Room 4 Resistance in Berlin. Eris has been playing and programming keyboards since she was a child. A long-time resident at Chicago's Smart Bar and DJ for the Bunker NY, she starting mixing records in 1994 at the age of 18. Her experiences as a musician and dancer showed her that rave is a powerful apparatus which can be used to transform individual lives and communities.
Follow Eris on SoundCloud, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

More Features

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DJ and producer Eris Drew makes deep personal connections between the Rave parties she loves and spiritual practices.

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COMMUNITAS RAVE AND RITUAL: THE RELIGIOSITY OF PARTYING

But spiritual enlightenment does not need to be confined within the naves of the church, just as the activities that lead to it are not always holy.

to cultivate an immersive environment for intense experiences.

The spontaneous sense of community that emerges in the rave subculture, paired with the meditative qualities of electronic music, lends rave a ritual status: a peaceful crusade premised on inclusivity that acts as this era’s hallowed pilgrimage.

outlet to partiers for the frustration, delight and perplexity that accumulates from the trials and tribulations of the everyday.

provides a sensory portfolio of the ethos that charmed a community into a hedonistic haze

The anarchist philosophy that originally led raves into abandoned spaces adds to the sense of pilgrimage: an intimate group of like-minded individuals journeying outside of their day-to-day enclosures, liberated from regularity and united in songs of praise.

design of clubbing spaces has long created an immersive atmosphere which encourages escapism and nurtures alternative experiences

120 and 150 beats per minute, techno’s speed and repetitive nature can induce a meditative state,

One intimate UK festival called The Tower recreated the female uterus, urging festival-goers to step into a satin-lined vagina and walk through a flesh-red walled uterus into a cavernous dancefloor reverberating with techno. Leaving the “womb” in the early hours of the morning represents rebirth, nodding to the parallels between raving and religio-spiritual enlightenment.

Jesper Henriksson, co-founder of The Tower, acknowledges this effect: “One could even say that rave has in some ways replaced religious gatherings for a younger generation.”

The way in which raving has become, for some, a weekend ritual implies a devotion similar to religion. Your first rave is an experience likened to holy communion, an initiation into a nocturnal world guided by a different ethos.

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From stigmata to bacchanalia, the ecstasies of elevated faith have long been documented in religions and cultures across the world, and such brushes with the divine are traditionally recorded in the language of religion. But spiritual enlightenment does not need to be confined within the naves of the church, just as the activities that lead to it are not always holy. Since the mid-twentieth century, the darkest folds of the urban fabric have played host to ravers in pursuit of nocturnal ecstasy. While the landscape of raving has evolved since the emergence of club culture amidst the social and sexual revolution of the 60s, the ethos has remained constant: to cultivate an immersive environment for intense experiences. The spontaneous sense of community that emerges in the rave subculture, paired with the meditative qualities of electronic music, lends rave a ritual status: a peaceful crusade premised on inclusivity that acts as this era's hallowed pilgrimage.

Just as the devout have their places of worship, raving has historically provided a physical outlet to partiers for the frustration, delight and perplexity that accumulates from the trials and tribulations of the everyday. The spatial configuration of the rave plays an equally important role in promoting escapism as the music itself; an environment that juxtaposes the regularity of home provokes extraordinary experiences. It's precisely this elevated environment that is explored in the latest exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany; "Night Fever. Designing Club Culture 1960 - Today" provides a sensory portfolio of the ethos that charmed a community into a hedonistic haze. The physical landscape of the party scene has evolved since the 60s; parties have spilled out from clubs and arenas into the derelict structures of the city and the grassy vacant plains that stretch across the countryside.

The anarchist philosophy that originally led raves into abandoned spaces adds to the sense of pilgrimage: an intimate group of like-minded individuals journeying outside of their day-to-day enclosures, liberated from regularity and united in songs of praise. The raves of the late 80s capture this renegade mentality: acid house king Tony Colston-Hayter used the British Telecom's Voicebank system to withhold the location of his illegal raves until the last minute, with patrons calling a number to receive answerphone messages revealing meeting points along the M25 before the rave site was unveiled. Drawing inspiration, albeit legally, from past rave culture, UK festival Houghton - the lovechild of Fabric resident DJ Craig Richards and the people behind Gottwood - takes place on the grounds of an opulent Palladian home. The utopic woodland setting emulates the raves of the early 90s, a mosaic of cathartic melodies creating a journey into ulterior dimensions. Dilapidated warehouse structures and subterranean quarries are set around an iridescent lake: an ethereal empire with a temporary existence.

It's clear that the design of clubbing spaces has long created an immersive atmosphere which encourages escapism and nurtures alternative experiences - bright lights and rising smoke enhance the visual field and stimulate sensation. Tom Belgeonne, the man behind Noisily Festival which is set in the rolling hills of Leicestershire, comments on the transformative effects of immediate surroundings: "It breaks us out of our normal environment and puts us in this playful contemplative state which is such an important phase in the mind's development; it's during this time that new ideas and beliefs have a chance to set themselves into our deeds and actions."

One intimate UK festival called The Tower recreated the female uterus, urging festival-goers to step into a satin-lined vagina and walk through a flesh-red walled uterus into a cavernous dancefloor reverberating with techno. Leaving the "womb" in the early hours of the morning represents rebirth, nodding to the parallels between raving and religio-spiritual enlightenment. For those with the stamina to push through the night to witness the gleam of daybreak, the sense of pilgrimage is even more profound, having completed the journey collectively to arrive at the final destination renewed, transformed and uplifted, united by their mutual experience. Jesper Henriksson, co-founder of The Tower, acknowledges this effect: "One could even say that rave has in some ways replaced religious gatherings for a younger generation." Likewise, Berlin's Berghain epitomises the concept of modern-day pilgrimage. Commonly referred to as "The Church", the club's Sunday sessions are known as "Sunday Mass". Architect Thomas Karsten notes that the club's construction emulates that of a cathedral in the Middle Ages, observing that "there's something almost spiritual about the atmosphere."

Arriving in an environment that is markedly different to the venues that form the map of regularity allows for personal transformation, enabling the ego to slip away and merge into a single, united body. The way in which raving has become, for some, a weekend ritual implies a devotion similar to religion. Your first rave is an experience likened to holy communion, an initiation into a nocturnal world guided by a different ethos. The intense level of physical and emotional output demanded by 72-hour-long parties, which lure you back weekend after weekend, elevates raving to something with ritual status: a modern interpretation of the ecstatic celebrations that unite native communities all over the globe. The sense of inclusivity and unity-in-diversity found at raves embodies the social ethos of rave subculture, cutting across lines of ethnicity, class, age, nationality, gender, sexual orientation and other socially constructed prejudices. Belgeonne acknowledges the importance of community for his festival: "To have a truly diverse audience shows us how we are all the same and gives the opportunity for true actions of non-judgement to be experienced. The audience is the Noisily atmosphere".

British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner conceptualised this phenomenon of collectivity as "communitas", which he describes as the spontaneous community which forms in the initial stage of the ritual process, outside of the constraints of normal social roles. Rave alleviates its patrons of responsibility and frees them of expectation, dissolving the social constraints that plague the modern world. The rave community has developed into an interconnected organisation, rooted in openness and fuelled by ongoing shared spiritual experience. The parallels between the rave community and religio-spiritual organisationsare clear; these are communities that are united by a common interest and mutual commitment. However, the latter is normally rallied by a cult figure or overarching ideology, while the former is a much more organic development founded on inclusivity rather than exclusion. Similar to the emergence of the acid house scene in Thatcher's enraged and unemployed Britain, the Berlin techno scene represents the collective spirit of disenchantment that was simmering away during the decades prior to unification, amalgamating in the aggressive, minimalist and raw nature of techno. Historically, rave has unified communities in the face of division: a nocturnal union that provides an escape from the rules and routines of everyday life.

No place of worship would be complete without its music, song as integral to the act of ritual as the revellers themselves. For clubbers, the constant rhythm and continual motion of electronic music is hypnotic, providing a powerful bodily experience that transports focus from their head to their body. Oscillating between 120 and 150 beats per minute, techno's speed and repetitive nature can induce a meditative state, especially when whisked with soft percussive elements like consistently rolling hi-hats. Sound maestro Tony Andrews, the man behind Funktion-One, appreciates the enchanting qualities of crisp electronic music; "good sound is a state of meditation. If you feel yourself being pulled towards a meditative state, you know the sound is good. When it's really good, you don't know the difference between the inside of your head and the outside of your head," he states. Dancing-induced ecstasy offers a release from routine movement, luring you into a trance state similar to that of possession, the music transforming into a charming temptress. The ritualistic elements of rave have been expressed to new levels in some communities in Los Angeles, where patrons are smeared with sage in between sets in ode to ancient Native American tribal practices.

The landscape of the clubbing scene has evolved from conventional spaces to alternative dwellings but, despite the shift in structural surroundings, the ethos of inclusivity and acceptance has sustained. Rave culture continues to cultivate escapism and devalue the restrictions of the everyday, creating a unified communitas who join together in their own take on ecclesiastic ecstasy, long into the dawn.
The exhibition "Night Fever. Designing Club Culture 1960 - Today", was showing at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein until 9 September. It explored and featured rare imagery of some of the world's most famous clubs, like Bill Bernstein's photos from guests at legendary New York venues Studio 54 and Xenon taken in 1979, as well as the impressive architecture and design underlying these places. Images BILL BERNSTEIN, DAVID HILL GALLERY, LONDON Taken from INDIE NO 60, THE HOME ISSUE - get your copy here.

in "CULTURE"

in "CULTURE"

in "CULTURE"

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How ritualistic partying turned the rave into a religion

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From stigmata to bacchanalia, the ecstasies of elevated faith have long been documented in religions and cultures across the world, and such brushes with the divine are traditionally recorded in the language of religion. But spiritual enlightenment does not need to be confined within the naves of the church, just as the activities that lead to it are not always holy.

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The Religious Experience of the Rave - Theatre Arts - UIowa Wiki

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https://aidabruyere.com/SpecialGyal

with the current climate of an increase in spiking, women do not feel this united feeling of coming together, being as one, they are scared. How can I use this project to empower women

using dance as empowerment against...

why have we lost that sense of unity

Rave culture is expanding and we need to preserve its integrity. We must demand the R(espect) in PLUR from those who may grope and degrade us/ spike us.

intimidated by the freedom of our bodies.

This is our dance floor too

While dance encourages freedom of expression, women are often excluded, stifled and boxed in. Like many social systems, dance is structured to limit women. Those who do push beyond the expectation, are both exploited and shamed for their bodies and sexuality.

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SpecialGyal

SpecialGyalUniverse est un battle de dancehall exclusivement féminin qui a eu lieu le 3 décembre 2017 à Saint-Ouen. Cet évènement est à l'initiative de Aya Level, une danseuse reconnue dans la scène du dancehall européen.SpecialGyal est une collection classée des mouvements de base qui ont été récupérés pendant la compétition et qui diffèrent en fonction de l'attitude et de l'énergie mise par les danseuses dedans.

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SpecialGyalUniverse est un battle de dancehall exclusivement féminin qui a eu lieu le 3 décembre 2017 à Saint-Ouen. Cet évènement est à l'initiative de Aya Level, une danseuse reconnue dans la scène du dancehall européen.SpecialGyal est une collection classée des mouvements de base qui ont été récupérés pendant la compétition et qui diffèrent en fonction de l'attitude et de l'énergie mise par les danseuses dedans.

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There's a contention proposed that raves operated as temporal places of worship, more like stone circles than cathedrals, places that could be visited, worshipped over a weekend, before the flock move on.

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MODERN RAVE CULTURE (PART 1) - Shamanic Roots and Spiritual Healing

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The Mental Health Benefits of Raving. Why we need the dancefloor more than ever before

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The Mental Health Benefits of Raving. Why we need the dancefloor more than ever before

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It fosters human connection

Dancing increases wellbeing

Mental disconnection from the everyday: where we mentally disconnect.

Verbal communication is kept to a minimum, so you dance without words.

Body language becomes the means of communication.

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THE POTENTIAL POWER OF THE CLUBBING AND DANCE CULTURE EVENT

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THE POTENTIAL POWER OF THE CLUBBING AND DANCE CULTURE EVENT

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An investigation on the club and dance culture event, stressing on the empowering potentiality of this practice in both an individual and a social level, with particular reference to the rave movement  emerging in London in the late 80s and spreading in Western Europe from the beginning of the 90s.

Dance background
Parents rave background

I wanted to inquire into performance that has positive empowering potential, that can be vitalizing, connecting and enlivening us to our own energy and to the energies around us.

This led me back to the club and dance culture event, and its practices, particularly the rave movement, looking at the role of music, of the dancing, the crowd community, and how it can facilitate ecstatic experiences and be empowering on an individual as well as on a wider social level.

rave events are particularly of a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual shamanistic vitalising and empowering spirit

club events are whole immersive social and performative events where music and dance merge and are embodied by the crowd

. It is a socio-spatio-temporal and bodily-emotional practice.

“The rave/club culture is described as an arena of youth transformation made possible by the spatialization and performance of music, and thought dependent upon the way participants ‘negotiate liminality’ throughout the course of events” (St John Graham, 2004, p.11).

Clubbing and especially rave’s dance music are predominantly emphasizing the rhythmical aspect of music, the beat and bass, which, when going through the strong and loud sound-system, become an intense sensory, bodily and viscerally felt experience as much as heard, especially the sub-bass, and initiates a new and utter physicality. It is pure energy.

“Dancing within clubbing might be interpreted as an expressive form of thinking, sensing, feeling and processing which may be constituted through, as well as reflecting, strong relationships between clubber and the clubbing crowd, and in turn between the clubbing crowd and the society of which it is a part. Dancing within clubbing can be about […] a form of embodied resistance and source of personal and social vitality. (Malborn, 1999, p. 86-87)

Potential ecstatic experiences or altered states, involving some form of transformation in consciousness, may be experienced:

These experiences of playful vitality and ecstatic states can be refreshing and revitalizing and provide sensations of  strength and empowering individually and socially, in the moment but also beyond the clubbing event, infusing into the clubbers’ daily live.

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The potential power of the clubbing and dance culture event.

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Essay written for the Radical Performance module during my Performance Making MA at Goldsmiths 7/5/2013 An investigation on the club and dance culture event, stressing on the empowering potentialit…

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Music can affect your conscious state in much the same way recreational drugs can. It has the power to regulate the way we feel at the push of a button. Many people understand this without realizing the full potential music holds as a consciousness-altering tool.
Listening to your favorite album on the bus to work will also undoubtedly help you start your day in a better way, something which the rise in portable music players is contributing towards. We are rapidly learning more and more about the affects of sound upon human beings while fields such as music therapy are now becoming established alternative medical practices.

Shamanic Culture
Ancient cultures have understood and utilized the affects of psychoacoustics on consciousness for thousands of years. Interestingly, particular aspects of modern electronic music mirror those employed by these cultures. Indeed it is not only dance music that holds this potential, as therapists and fans of binaural beats will testify.
- Binaural beats modify brain wave activity and are said to aid relaxation and learning
Shamanism is used colloquially as a blanket term to describe traditional tribal religions not stemming from the Abrahamic faith structure that most of our 'contemporary' religions are based upon. In a broader context it can be described as the employment of altered states of consciousness within a tribal setting for the purposes of healing and guidance. Analyzing Shamanic music we find that drumming is the key factor in it's structure. Mostly it is very minimal and simple, sometimes with only a rhythm formed from a 'bass' drum. Monotonous patterns are played with varying degrees of fervor and reserve to create a journey like experience through the music.

"Try listening to the 'Sacred drums of Burundi' and you'll see that the effect of this
music is not very far from the effect caused by techno or electronic music,
as these musical styles both work on
the concept of loops" - Dino Sabatini.
- The sacred drums of Burundi.
Shamanism has used sound as a tool for thousands of years in order to alter individual consciousness. It allows one to experience a different sort of reality to the normal operating state that categorizes our waking hours. Some call it a trance or dream state but in this regard, we will categorize it as being meditative. The shamans utilize this for various purposes, such as healing and problem solving within the community. Just like meditation it seems to have a grounding, peaceful and ecstatic effect upon those who step into its realm. Modern science has shed light upon the changes within our brains. When subjected to this kind of music it is literally the effect of the music upon the human brain which gives rise to these altered states of consciousness.

The Rhythmic Patterns
Our brain waves oscillate within four different bands of frequency: Alpha (relaxed state), Beta (normal daily functioning), Theta (dream state) and Delta (Deep sleep.) Brain scanning has shown that when subjected to Shamanic drumming the brain waves of the listener move down into the Theta band whilst they are awake. The listener experiences this as an altered sense of reality, which normally only occurs during sleep. This scientific evidence shows how repetitive drumming produces different states of consciousness in individuals.

It is not only drumming which can induce these states. We know that long periods of meditation, inducing large amounts of pain, physical exertion, sleep deprivation, fasting and sensory overload can all induce an altered state. These techniques are often used together with the music to give rise to a more intense experience within the individual.

- Dino Sabatini's White witch taken from his Shamanism inspired album 'Shamans Path - Prologue Music 2013'

Comparatively, modern electronic music's use of repetition mirrors that of Shamanic drumming. Genres such as techno, trance and house all employ (for the most part) the same straight 4/4 drum patterns. Today it is not uncommon for clubs and festivals to remain open for days on end, providing an environment where one can physically exert one's self through dance. The music often never stops for long intervals with DJs creating an environment where the listener is constantly suspended within the music. Strobe lights, lasers and abstract video projections are also the norm in most music venues, providing sensorial stimulation to go alongside the music, adding to the atmosphere of a space and giving it a sense of abstraction. These dance-spaces are literally fashioned to form an environment of sensorial stimulation that is are both rich and overwhelming.

- Shammanic drumming from author and composer, Michael Drake
Drugs
Mind altering drugs play a role in both cultures. Whilst it is at first hard to compare the use of psychedelic drugs as used by Shamans with the stimulants favored on most dance floors, it is important to note that both cultures use drugs that allow a shortcut to different perceptions of reality. Most Shamanic traditions that use drugs have no need for the physical and sensorial methods used by others. Their drugs, such as Ayahuasca, are so powerful that they allow passage into other states with out the need for other practices.

By far the most popular recreational drug (discounting alcohol) taken at raves and clubs today is MDMA. Using the drug, users report a closer connection between themselves, the music and others around them. The music is seemingly more alive and emotionally touching, hypnotizing the users into dancing for hours upon end. MDMA seems to be the perfect drug for the dance floor as it induces a state where one is totally focused upon and in touch with the music. Some meditative techniques, it is worth noting, instruct the individual to focus upon sound and in doing so the mind is cleared of thought, worries or emotion. A clear similarity between a meditative technique and the effects of this widely used drug.

"I see that DJs are the modern day Shamans. In the past Shamans have
come from a place of healing and music within indigenous tribes.
I think that DJs play a weird malfunctioning Shaman role" - Jimmy Edgar

Could it be that both cultures are aiming for the same target albeit through slightly different techniques? The similarities between Shamanic music and modern electronic music are undeniable as is the sensorial stimulation that both cultures employ. Drugs complete the picture as the final comparative.

We lead hectic and intense lives in this new millennium and for many there is no better way to unwind than to get lost in the music. It seems to provide an opportunity for mass meditation and therapy that few other experiences in our techno-industrial society can offer. Many people follow the culture with religious-like zeal and ironically many often find alternative parties on Sundays, replacing the day's traditional religious entertainment of yesteryear.

It is up to individuals to come to their own rational conclusions about what can occur in these situations and for some the idea of a transcendental element to dance music will seem absurd. At first it may be hard to connect this theory with the scenes of mayhem and debauchery we witness at clubs and festivals. Yet many artists today profess to provide a deeper experience through their music.

"When we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey.
When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
And exactly the same thing is true in meditation.
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment" - Alan Watts.

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Music can affect your conscious state in much the same way recreational drugs can. It has the power to regulate the way we feel at the push of a button. Many people understand this without realizing the full potential music holds as a consciousness-altering tool.

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The rave: Spiritual healing in modern western subcultures

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The rave: Spiritual healing in modern western subcultures

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Rave and religion? A contemporary youth phenomenon as seen through the lens of religious studies

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Rave and religion? A contemporary youth phenomenon as seen through the lens of religious studies

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ResearchGate is a network dedicated to science and research. Connect, collaborate and discover scientific publications, jobs and conferences. All for free.

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it facilitates dance and unity

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. Results showed that all four EDM event facets were positively associated with psychological and social well-being measures.

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powerful physical-experiential phenomenon that also affects visual culture

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Where Nothing Happens is a project I had developed in which I compile the history of abandoned or temporarily disused nightclubs in Ibiza, my birthplace. Each of these spaces are different types of ruins and inside this project each functions independently. T

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Donde nada ocurre 2011 - 2016
Where Nothing Happens

Donde nada ocurre is an ongoing project comprising five different works:

Donde nada ocurre es un proyecto en curso compuesto por cinco trabajos diferentes:

(click the links)

IDEA 2013
FESTIVAL CLUB 2013
HEAVEN 2015
TORO MAR 2016
GLORY'S 2016

Where Nothing Happens is a project I had developed in which I compile the history of abandoned or temporarily disused nightclubs in Ibiza, my birthplace. Each of these spaces are different types of ruins and inside this project each functions independently. There are specific pieces for each of the chosen locations: Festival Club, Idea, Heaven, Toro Mar and Glory´s. I produced a newspaper in collaboration with the Diario de Ibiza, which includes the news and advertisements of the clubs related to the project, from 1969 to 2012.

The whole project has been exhibited at the Museo Patio Herreriano of Valladolid, curated by Javier Hontoria. More info: Donde nada ocurre, Irene de Andrés. Through this exhibition you'll find three poems related to the island written by Ben Clark.

Interview speaking about the project at

Donde nada ocurre es un proyecto que he llevado a cabo recogiendo la memoria de discotecas y salas de fiesta abandonadas o temporalmente en desuso en Ibiza, mi tierra natal. Cada uno de estos espacios es un tipo de ruina distinta y dentro del proyecto funcionan de manera autónoma y con piezas específicas para las localizaciones elegidas: Festival Club, Idea, Heaven, Toro Mar y Glory's. Con la colaboración del Diario de Ibiza se ha editado un periódico que contiene noticias y anuncios desde 1969 hasta 2012 de cada una de estas salas.

Todo el proyecto ha sido expuesto en el Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid, comisariada por Javier Hontoria. Para más información: Donde nada ocurre. Irene de Andrés. En esta exposición se encuentran tres poemas acerca de la isla escritos por Ben Clark.

Artículos sobre la exposición:
Disco ruina, Juan José Santos Mateo, publicado en Babelia, el País.
Les primeres ruïnes de la nit d'Eivissa, Antoni Ribas Tur. Publicado en ARA.Cat
Avaiable Light

> Puedes descargar el periódico a través de este enlace:PDF

Sala 1. Donde nada ocurre, Museo Patio Herreriano / Videos online: https://vimeo.com/showcase/4885249

Sala 2. Donde nada ocurre, Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid.

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Donde nada ocurre 2011 - 2016 Where Nothing Happens Donde nada ocurre is an ongoing project comprising five different works: Donde nada ocurre es un proyecto en curso compuesto por cinco trabajos diferentes: (click the links) IDEA 2013 FESTIVAL CLUB 2013 HEAVEN 2015 TORO MAR 2016 GLORY'S 2016 Where Nothing Happens is a project I had developed in which I compile the history of abandoned or temporarily disused nightclubs in Ibiza, my birthplace.

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5.00

church like element
gathering to celebrate something you can't explain

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the roots of what the dance floor can be
purpose to bring people together
create a community and space - sanctuary
beating heart of music culture
from intimate club to abandoned warehouses
place to let go
immersive sensory expience

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dance is an inclusive dialogue

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Union Rave, by Andreas Gursky, 1995 Courtesy Felix Speller for the Design Museum

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Union Rave, by Andreas Gursky, 1995 Courtesy Felix Speller for the Design Museum

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The Infinite Mix: Contemporary Sound and Image brings together recent audiovisual artworks that combine sounds and images in ways that that are at once conceptually and emotionally immersive.

Soulful and audacious in their exploration of wide-ranging subjects, these works use the medium of film and video to explore the poetics as well as the politics of music, performance and cultural history.

https://theinfinitemix.com

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Featuring Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller & Cecilia Bengolea, Stan Douglas, Cyprien Gaillard, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Cameron Jamie, Kahlil Joseph, Elizabeth Price, Ugo Rondinone and Rachel Rose.

The Infinite Mix: Contemporary Sound and Image brings together recent audiovisual artworks that combine sounds and images in ways that that are at once conceptually and emotionally immersive. Soulful and audacious in their exploration of wide-ranging subjects, these works use the medium of film and video to explore the poetics as well as the politics of music, performance and cultural history.

Stylistic composites, the works in The Infinite Mix draw on diverse genres including documentary film, music video, theatrical performance and experimental cinema. Whether recording eccentric dance moves in suburban Alabama, offering a prismatic portrait of life in Compton, California, revisiting an astronaut's reflections on gravity, or zeroing in on the everyday choreography of crossing a street, these works dispense with straightforward storytelling in favour of a non-linear approach more akin to musical composition. Many of the works also play with cinematic conventions in unexpected ways. In documenting an impossibly endless (and endlessly inventive) jam session or evoking the ghostly apparition of a late opera singer, they pointedly remix our notions of history and fiction, the real and the staged, the everyday and the sublime.

Spanning a variety of formats-from immersive 3D video to holographic illusions and multi-screen installations-the works in The Infinite Mix also challenge the ways that we think about visual experience. Several installations in the exhibition feature images that seem to have a physical character or that activate the space around them in a fashion that we usually associate with sculpture. Others use sound to enhance and modify our spatial perception and alter our response to the accompanying image tracks. Both types of work disturb our customary sense of dimensionality-including that of the psychological spaces that images and sounds generate within us-in ways that are both unsettling and seductive.

For each of the works in this exhibition, what you hear is just as important as what you see. While some of the works feature original scores composed or commissioned by the artists, others make use of existing tracks and outtakes-often radically remixed-by a diverse range of performers including Sonic Youth, opera singer Maria Callas and rapper Kendrick Lamar.

In orchestrating a dynamic and transformative interplay between sounds and pictures, the works in The Infinite Mix frequently split our focus between competing streams of information on audio and visual tracks. In this way they open up and extend our involvement as spectators, prompting us to make choices about where we direct our attention and how we filter-or remix-our experience of the work. In elaborating this aesthetic of infinite mixes, they underscore art's potentially inexhaustible openness, and its ability to continue to trace new lines of connection, affiliation and association.

Curated by Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery. Project Curator: Eimear Martin, Hayward Gallery

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. In addition to an introductory essay by Ralph Rugoff, this catalogue includes in-depth discussions of the individual works by a range of authors-including JJ Charlesworth, Lilly Lampe, David Norr and Michael Vass-and interviews with several of the artists. Pre-order a copy here.

The Infinite Mix is the Hayward Gallery's first-ever major off-site exhibition. It is presented in association with The Vinyl Factory at the new creative space The Store, 180 The Strand.

*(1) Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, OPERA (QM.15), 2016. © DACS 2016. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin. (2) Jeremy Deller and Cecilia Bengolea, Bom Bom's Dream, 2016. © and courtesy the artists. (3) Ugo Rondinone, THANX 4 NOTHING, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber. © Ugo Rondinone. (4) Rachel Rose, Everything and More (still), 2015. Film. Courtesy of the artist, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London, and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York. © Rachel Rose. (5) Kahlil Joseph, m.a.a.d (still), 2014. Film. Courtesy of the artist and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (6) Stan Douglas, Luanda-Kinshasa, 2013. © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/London, and Victoria Miro London.

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The Infinite Mix: Contemporary Sound and Image - Announcements - e-flux

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Featuring Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller & Cecilia Bengolea, Stan Douglas, Cyprien Gaillard, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Cameron Jamie, Kahlil Joseph, Elizabeth Price, Ugo Rondinone and Rachel Rose. The Infinite Mix: Contemporary Sound and Image brings together recent audiovisual artworks that combine sounds and images in ways that that are at once conceptually and emotionally immersive.

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Creative expression. Dancing gives students a chance to express themselves freely and creatively. In other words, it serves as an outlet for emotional and physical release. This is especially beneficial for students who’d prefer to use movement rather than words to communicate, or express, their feelings.

Effective communication. Many dances, like Rumba and Swing, require students to work as partners or teams to complete the moves. To do so, students must learn to communicate effectively - verbally and nonverbally - to follow cues and coordinate their moves. This also fosters cooperation and teamwork among students.

Self regulation. Learning to dance requires increased focus and discipline. Over time, dance can help students focus their attention, control their emotions and manage their behavior when tough situations arise. This skill is also an essential tool for learning. Students with good self regulation can pay attention to activities, ignore distractions, carry out tasks and resist impulses.

Acceptance of others. Dance is a universal language and can transcend all cultures. It allows students to forget about their differences and focus on one thing they all have in common: dance. It also gives them an opportunity to explore cultural dance forms from across the world, which also fosters acceptance and understanding of others.

Self confidence. Dancing promotes a general sense of well-being in students. As they master new skills, perform in front of others and receive positive reinforcement, their confidence reaches new levels. And self-confident students believe in their abilities, get along well with others and are better equipped to handle challenging situations.

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When we consider the benefits of dancing, we often think about how it supports physical development in students. Dance increases their flexibility and range of motion as well as improves their balance, coordination and muscle strength.

But what's often overlooked are the ways dance can promote important social-emotional skills. Through movement, students can learn acceptance, respect, teamwork and cooperation. By extension, students also develop empathy, which is the key to building healthy relationships with others.
How Dance Impacts Social-Emotional Development
Many schools and organizations have realized the social-emotional benefits dance offers, and have put it to the test. One organization in particular, Dancing Classrooms, brings ballroom dancing to schools in underserved communities across the country. The mission is to cultivate essential life skills - like respect, teamwork and confidence - through the art of social dance.

And it works. In a 2014-2015 survey of L.A.-area school principals, 66% reported increased acceptance among their students, while 81% of students said they treated others with more respect, following the program. What's more, a two-year study of the program found that 95% of teachers noticed improved cooperative and collaborative skills in program participants.
5 Ways Dance Improves Social-Emotional Skills
From hip hop to ballroom, all forms of dance can play an important role in fostering social and emotional development in students. Let's take a closer look at the ways in which dance can boost social-emotional skills:

Creative expression. Dancing gives students a chance to express themselves freely and creatively. In other words, it serves as an outlet for emotional and physical release. This is especially beneficial for students who'd prefer to use movement rather than words to communicate, or express, their feelings.

Effective communication. Many dances, like Rumba and Swing, require students to work as partners or teams to complete the moves. To do so, students must learn to communicate effectively - verbally and nonverbally - to follow cues and coordinate their moves. This also fosters cooperation and teamwork among students.

Self regulation. Learning to dance requires increased focus and discipline. Over time, dance can help students focus their attention, control their emotions and manage their behavior when tough situations arise. This skill is also an essential tool for learning. Students with good self regulation can pay attention to activities, ignore distractions, carry out tasks and resist impulses.

Acceptance of others. Dance is a universal language and can transcend all cultures. It allows students to forget about their differences and focus on one thing they all have in common: dance. It also gives them an opportunity to explore cultural dance forms from across the world, which also fosters acceptance and understanding of others.

Self confidence. Dancing promotes a general sense of well-being in students. As they master new skills, perform in front of others and receive positive reinforcement, their confidence reaches new levels. And self-confident students believe in their abilities, get along well with others and are better equipped to handle challenging situations.

On the surface, dancing is a great way to have fun, burn energy and learn about movement. But it can also build key social-emotional skills in students. Find creative ways to incorporate dance into your program. Invite a dance instructor to show your students a few dance moves. Or simply have a dance break session with kid-safe songs or this Dance Your Way to Fitness CD Set that includes salsa, swing, soul and more. The key is to use dance in a way that fosters social-emotional development in your students.

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Using Dance to Boost Social-Emotional Skills | ExtendED Notes

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When we consider the benefits of dancing, we often think about how it supports physical development in students. Dance increases their flexibility and range of motion as well as improves their balance, coordination and muscle strength. But what's often overlooked are the ways dance can promote important social-emotional skills.

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power of dance, music and  feeling unitedt: feeling less socially aware

dance as a social movement

sharing space

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Raves, or nightlife, can sometimes be the closest we can get to being true, carnal human beings: losing ourselves and simultaneously feeling and forgetting everything.

The physical endurance crossed with the climax of emotion – drug-induced or not – are probably the times that we felt the most alive.

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GILLIAN WEARING - Dancing in Peckham

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQqZj7DhRzQ
- dance v the real world

MARK LECKEY - Fiorucci made me Hardcore
- video/ short film
- reflects on the inclusiveness of raves through images of crowds: exploring community aspect and social connections

EROL ALKAN- - "A Hold on Love" (Official Music Video) DIRECTED BY Daniel Brereton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlCjrSy0-08
- Music video
- Takes you on a journey

19:30 Aleksandra Domanović

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=345293542962048

- found something to compare raves too
-  the artist amasses an archive of evening news idents from the former Yugoslavia, spanning 1958 to the present, and invites DJs to remix them.
- Techno and the evening news were moments of remembered togetherness for the artist and others from the region during a period of change and turmoil, and the combination of the two creates a complex layering of psychological and historical memories of a country that no longer exists.
- The idea of dancing and being somewhere else mentally is really strong, I think, and powerfully communicated; it’s mournful yet celebratory – full of energy and lively bodies.

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14 artists inspired by rave culture - BOILER ROOM

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Boiler Room is the leading platform for quality new music.

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Process of translating between verbal language and nonverbal modes of communication.

It is in the discrepancy between words and any other language, say, images, emotions, bodily movements or sounds, that his art is located

Why the inclusiveness of rave culture should remain an inspiration to us today.

In today’s socio-political climate there’s a lot we could learn from this open, multicultural, multi-class world.

“It was a beautiful thing to watch this social moment. People from so many different backgrounds all cohabiting the same space and getting along. This is something you never encounter in an art gallery."

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Why has this artist installed a pirate radio booth in a central London art gallery?

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This Finsbury Park artist just installed a legendary pirate radio station in a south London art gallery. He explains why the inclusiveness of rave culture should remain an inspiration to us today.

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UNIVERSALISM
Leckey tells me: “I never doubt music partly because of its universalism. If you ever do meet someone who doesn’t listen to music that would be very odd and unusual, so it’s something that touches everybody.” Universalism and inclusivity is something that’s often lacking in contemporary art, but is the ethos the rave scene was built on. The inclusive nature of music and its ability to instantly relay a message has a satisfaction to it that the painstaking, analytical interpretation and untangling of structures and discourses of art doesn’t.

ESCAPISM
Britain was grey, drab and lifeless and desperately lacking in prospects for young people. In contrast, raves were explosions of sound, colour and diversity filled with unknown opportunities and unexpected encounters — they were a much needed departure from the dismal norm that had afflicted Britain. In the face of adversity ravers organised a way of escaping the depressing restraints of Thatcher-driven austerity and unemployment, creating their own communities based around a love of raving.

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Still from Mark Leckey's 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore'

The UK is on the verge of Brexit, in political deadlock, and public spending cuts continue to bite - things have definitely been better. Saying that, it was under a Thatcher government and in a similar climate of austerity, anxiety and tribulation that an important youth movement was spawned. A movement that would arguably be the last bonafide, original and liberated subculture of our time.

30 years after the second Summer ofLove, rave culture's influence still looms large in music, fashion, art and culture. Artists like Jeremy Deller create historical documentaries of the rave scene with - using rare and unseen archive footage, showing abandoned warehouse raves and the chaotic release of the dance floor - while fashion groups like Wavey Garms dress London's youth in impeccably researched, vintage rave attire.

Rave culture has reached full throwback status, even to the point of having '90s rave' novelty nights at Ministry of Sound. Clubs are filled with bucket hats, whistles and over-sized trainers, while kids who weren't born the first time round dance to acid house and hardcore like some kind of pilled-up historical reenactment; with the same obsessive attention to detail.

Misty eyed nostalgia and the inevitable repetitive cycle of fashion can account for part of the current facsimile of rave, but why is it still so present in contemporary art?

From artist Mark Leckey filling gallery spaces with overpowering, monolithic sound systems and films that depict the early rave scene - like Fiorucci made me Hardcoreand the semi-autobiographical Dream English Kid - to Jeremy Deller's fetishisation of acid house smiley faces and fascination with the style of the time, to younger artists like Eddie Peake installing London pirate radio giants Kool FM to broadcast from White Cube Bermondsey during his exhibition Concrete Pitch, it seems rave and what it went on to create is ever present in the minds of some of the biggest names in contemporary art.

It's even had an impact across the pond with artist Corey Arcangel producing tongue in cheek, transatlantic takes on rave with his pieces 414-3-RAVE-95 - which he says "revisits the 'rave' dance party phenomenon of the early to mid-1990s" - and Cat Rave.

Whether it's the freedom of the subculture that is so sorely lacking in contemporary movements of its kind, boring old nostalgia or a fascination with something excitingly alien - rave's' influence is one that still manifests in myriad forms in art and culture.

The introduction of ecstasy to the UK party scene in the mid-1980s and the influence of Chicago House music created a wave of underground parties that were like nothing Britain had seen before.

The UK adopted music from the US, imported drugs from Europe and created pockets of hedonistic ravers whose main concerns were good music and a good time. Fashion became colourful and baggy, decorated with smiley faces and Om symbols. Rave flyers depicted utopian worlds filled with cyborgs and fractal landscapes, using Daliesque surrealism to create a sort of neo-psychedelia. The young people of Britain were creating one of the most original scenes and aesthetics since punk, and like punk it would alarm the establishment, cause moral panic and leave its mark in the minds of creatives. While the fledgling scene had started with a handful of cliquey space cadets tripping on acid, rave really came into its own when ecstasy took hold.

Although two of the main components (music and drugs) were essentially foreign imports, rave culture progressed into something quintessentially British, stylistically and sonically. The music began to shift from acid house into harder genres like hardcore and later jungle and ravers became increasingly discerning with their tastes. They were no longer taking LSD at small exclusive parties, they were scoffing e's in huge outdoor arenas of rave; where all were welcome.

The parties started in the UK's clubs and warehouses, but as the influx and reputation of ecstasy grew so did the party scene. By the late 1980s huge outdoor raves were cropping up on plots of land across the British countryside. The parties were clandestinely promoted on a word-of-mouth basis using a network of phone numbers that would be called at particular times to find out the locations of the parties. Mark Leckey remembers: "I was down in Brighton and it was 'cool' and a bit snobby and elitist and all the rest of it, but then when you got to the hardcore rave scene it completely changed and all the people that you wouldn't have expected or maybe excluded would look at you as a freaky acid head and everybody was now necking loads of e's. It's glib to say that it was just down to drugs but the pull of ecstasy was a big part of it."

Journalist and author Matthew Collin agrees with this analysis of the movement."There is a constant friction between two competing ideologies within any culture: the elitist versus the populist, the avant-garde against the mass," he says in his book Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. "Although each of its phases was marked by such conflicts, Ecstasy culture's prevailing ethos was inclusive." Ecstasy had been the driving force behind this new youth movement and became the glue that was holding it all together. The sudden popularity of an illegal drug and the temporary communities of party goers gathering around it seemed to intimidate the establishment. The press didn't know what to make of it, oscillating between moral panic and taking a jovial interest."There would be outrage one week then next week it was like, 'Buy your smiley rave t shirt'," Leckey explains. "It always felt very manufactured."

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was introduced in 1994 by the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard. With its ridiculous stipulations targeting "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" and the subsequent crack-down on raves, it was instrumental in driving the free party scene much deeper underground with only the real hardcore willing to take the risks involved in holding such events. The press fed into this hostile environment with headlines exclaiming: "ACID HOUSE SEX DRUGS AND MUSIC CULT THREAT TO OUR CHILDREN." and "£12 TRIP TO AN EVIL NIGHT OF ECSTASY - Drugs Peril Of The Acid House Craze." There was a feeling that there had been a resounding victory for the right wing government and press, who had put an end to a youth movement that may have been the last of its kind.

The only thing that seemed to remain of rave after the bill was passed was the music, which was rapidly being thrust in to the mainstream. Groups like The Prodigy and Altern 8 were performing on Top Of The Pops while kids up and down the country were drawing smiley faces on their pencil cases.

Music and art have always gone hand in hand, with arguably some of the most interesting contemporary art existing somewhere between the two. Artists such as Mark Leckey, Dinos Chapman, Jeremy Deller and Martin Creed have either integrated music into their work or pursued separate musical projects and endeavours. This love of music could be what makes rave so appealing to contemporary artists.

Leckey tells me: "I never doubt music partly because of its universalism. If you ever do meet someone who doesn't listen to music that would be very odd and unusual, so it's something that touches everybody." Universalism and inclusivity is something that's often lacking in contemporary art, but is the ethos the rave scene was built on. The inclusive nature of music and its ability to instantly relay a message has a satisfaction to it that the painstaking, analytical interpretation and untangling of structures and discourses of art doesn't.

" Music works in a different realm to art," Leckey continues. "What I like about music is that it's rhythmic, melodic and all the rest of it but within that you can incorporate storytelling, politics, angst in the way that art can never quite do. Art - especially with politics - it's very difficult to sublimate it in a way that music does. Music has some kind of innate politics to it I think because of who it's made by. Art is essentially middle class, and when I talk about universalism I'm talking about class, really. Art is still elite, even though that word seems quite dead - it's still a bourgeois pursuit in a lot of ways. Music for me is a way of countering that." Could the injection of rave into art be an attempt to satisfyingly simplify it, whilst shunning the bourgeois exclusivity of the art world?

It was the inclusive nature of music that made rave so unifying. As a subculture it seemed to transcend race, class and sexuality. Even though drugs heavily factored into the equation the heartbeat of rave was music. Music - in particular acid house and later hardcore - was given a sort of celestial devotion by ravers, who'd decided to opt out of normality in search of excitement and adventure. Britain was grey, drab and lifeless and desperately lacking in prospects for young people. In contrast, raves were explosions of sound, colour and diversity filled with unknown opportunities and unexpected encounters - they were a much needed departure from the dismal norm that had afflicted Britain. In the face of adversity ravers organised a way of escaping the depressing restraints of Thatcher-driven austerity and unemployment, creating their own communities based around a love of raving.

Artist Thomas Van Linge was born in 1989 in Holland - the same year of the second Summer of Love in the UK - and makes work influenced by the iconography and ethos of that era. His 2018 exhibition Deep Down Inside (named after the house classic Deep Inside by Hardrive)at J.Hammond Projects was an exploration into the physical objects that make up raves as well as the negative press that the scene garnered in the late 80s. Sculptures made from turntable flight cases emblazoned with laser cut motifs were scattered around the space against a sinister backdrop of, a now iconic, anti ecstasy cartoon from The Sun newspaper in 1988. The cartoon is recreated on laser cut sheets of metal and depicts a cloaked Devil offering pills to unsuspecting youths, whilst hidden behind a smiley face.

Install shot of 'Deep Inside' at J.Hammond Projects

"I think rave culture in a sense was maybe one of the last collective subcultures or youth movements that was very much tied to - on one hand an industrialised landscape - and on the other hand this feeling of purposelessness," he tells me. "Whereas now we're entering into a different age, but I think that was one of the last big collective. youth movements, which collectively responded to its environment. I'm not sure if we have had something of a similar scale or similar power since then.

" Maybe the Summer of Love has been, but it's not like the music and the scene itself from that point onwards hasn't evolved in to a completely new thing."

As well as making art Van Linge produces dance music heavily influenced by early acid house and runs two electronic music record labels, Bakk Records and Rubber, through which he also throws regular parties - an echo of the most vital element of rave, people coming together to dance. Van Linge's relationships with art and music are equally intense, with one not being able to emerge without the other. "I cannot exist without doing both," he explains. "So if I only make art I basically want to kill myself - not in a literal sense, but I have this thing inside me that I am trying to get to or get out - that's just a part of making things. One part is making artworks: sculptures, videos etc, which is very much a planned way of working for me. I think ahead, I work with with other companies to realise certain productions, I have to gather funds, I have to make decisions which rely on a lot of money so everything is very planned. There's room for spontaneity, but everything is decided whereas when I make music or when I release music on the label or when I DJ it's very much in the moment and that is the thing that isn't really touched when I make art.

" For me I have to experience both."

Video from Bakk records Instagram

If music were the only element that made rave culture so appealing, as a means of relaying messages in art, then surely it wouldn't have endured to this extent and in so many prominent artists work. Nostalgia could factor into the equation and there is a definitely an element of that in fashion and music, but let's face it, the function of nostalgia is pretty uninteresting and not particularly powerful. For the appeal of rave to have stuck it out in this way there must be something else. Matthew Wilkinson is a British artist based in LA who thinks there is more to it than music, drugs and dumb nostalgia. He tells me: "I think the symbolism and iconography of rave in art is a great simple example of freedom. It's was one of the last cultural movements before everything started eating itself and falling in on itself and becoming a postmodern rehash of something else." Being based in the U.S. Wilkinson sees first hand how far the influence of the British rave scene has stretched but how it has been contorted on its journey: "Sound system culture in general is a different thing here. They look at these [speaker cabinets] and they go 'oh yeah that reminds me of Miami bass car culture'. Obviously there's Chicago house music and Detroit techno, but American dance music now - let's face it - is not the best and they call it EDM. They got into the whole rave thing a lot later here and it became something quite ugly."

It seems that rave doesn't travel well, but from what Van Linge tells me it is something that is an unavoidable presence as a settler in the UK: "As soon as I moved to the UK I was of course very much in touch with the Dutch history of rave and gabba. I threw a lot of techno parties in the years before that so I was very much in touch with that specific aesthetic and history. Then when I moved here it was only natural for me to investigate that further than what I had seen on MTV as kid. I think also because I've always been interested in the relationship between the developments of youth subcultures and the technology and industry that developed with it or at least at the same time. Looking into the technological and industrial history of London and the buildings and the materials that were attached to it I immediately also encountered the rave aesthetic - it's hard to miss almost."

This also raises the question of authenticity. Jeremy Deller and Mark Leckey have both made art heavily influenced by the rave and free party scene, but have approached it from very different angles. Leckey's work draws from experience producing a semi autobiographical narrative using films and objects while Deller approaches it as a historian - documenting rave with films and performances and taking less of an experiential angle. Both artists are of a similar age and whether they navigated the M25 as kids trying to find parties or not they both lived through the era. Deller is vocal about the fact he was never at these raves, telling Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the Financial Times that: "At the time I was really interested in it but weirdly I didn't know how to get to them [raves]. So I missed out."

Should there be a level of authenticity or experience when documenting cultures of this kind? "There's this whole idea of 'back in the day you weren't there' but I don't think that matters at all," Wilkinson explains. "There's enough documentation around it and enough people that one can still go an talk to. I mean there's great old footage on Youtube of parties so it's all there and tangible. I don't think you have to had been there to authenticate your gestures."

When I asked Deller his reasons for documenting and teaching the history of rave he said he wanted to show "the wider picture". Last month I visited Deller's Wiltshire Before Christ at 180 The Strand - a collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, photographer David Simms and uber-cool streetwear brand Aries. The show continues Deller's fascination with Stonehenge and fuses it with rave iconography. Visitors were greeted by large spinning cut-outs of the National Trust logo and beaming acid house smiley faces painted on to straw archery targets. Large photos of eerie figures, hanging out in neolithic sites, dressed in hoodies and pagan robes decorated with slogans like "Make Archaeology Sexy Again" hang next to posters from the Stonehenge Festival, that used to take place on the Summer Solstice.

The exhibition and products, made by Aries, explored the ritualistic aspects of the neolithic period and the parallels they have with free parties. When asked what the link between rave culture and neolithic mysticism Deller told me: "What links them is ritual, abandonment, intoxication and the countryside." Deller isn't the only artist to make this link between rave, folklore, magic and mysticism. There is something about raves and their use of the British countryside that connects the ceremonial behaviour of druids and pagans and the structures they built. Wilkinson tells me: "It's really ritualistic - when you think about stone circles and solstice - Making these constructions [sound systems] to be almost worshipped. The big raves always happen on May Day or the solstice - they used to do the festival next to Stone Henge. It taps into our relationship with the land that people turn against nowadays or have done since the 18th century. It is that undeniable link and I think that's why - going back to America's relationship to rave culture they don't necessarily touch that side of it."

Raves were essentially temporary communities that would crop up on the landscape, erect monuments (sound systems), worship them for a few days then move on. These objects of technology often had a magical affinity. Leckey has often talked about the connection between magic and technology and tells me: "The more technology advances us into the future the more it paradoxically boomerangs us into the past where we start to think with this animistic mindset where everything's alive. In an aboriginal sense of like rocks and trees and animals talking to us - technology is actually producing the same affect where everything that surrounds us is able to communicate with us in some form or other.

"It comes from trying to grasp technology. The more pervasive, the more ubiquitous technology becomes the more, to me, it feels more magical - not in a good way necessarily, but it allows me to do all these things that once seemed impossible."

The objects that make up a rave - sound systems, flight cases, turntables, pills - are often fetishised in art or seen to be just as compelling as art itself. Wilkinson explains: "There's something incredible about big sound systems - just the engineering of it. These big bass bins only came into being in the late 20th century so they're emblematic of our time. They're these big monoliths and the physicality of standing next to these things is fascinating. The sound systems and cases etc is what you bring - it's the only constant in the environment and the scenery is a quarry or an old factory or disused air field from WWII."

Leckey informs me about his famous sound system sculptures saying: "I don't show them anymore to be honest. It's complicated but at the time - when I was showing sound systems and Fiorucci - I had an axe to grind with the art world, which was to say these things come from a culture that I came from and I think they are just as valid as anything that you've got in your museum. A sound system is as sophisticated and as aesthetically pleasing as any sculpture."

Turning these objects into art can arguably change the meaning they have attached them which isn't necessarily a positive thing. "Sound systems for me came from raves and it feels like they don't belong to me anymore," Leckey explains. "I still have that axe to grind, but I think that's perhaps going about it the wrong way. Basically you're this scout that's going out and acting as this go-between and you're bringing things from a culture that most people in museums don't know about and you're going, 'Look at this' and they go 'Oh that's exciting' and they introduce it to the galleries and then it gets sold, which is problematic as well. In the end it just makes me quite uncomfortable."

Contemporary art, like most creative industries, is sadly governed by money. When something like a subculture is absorbed by the commercial side of art and somehow tamed or cut up into easily digested pieces, made palatable for a particular audience, there is a something disheartening about it. Should movements like rave culture be kept solely for those who dared to experience them and a million miles away from contemporary art, or is documenting them in this way as important as documenting any part of history? Whatever the answer may be, rave culture's impact as one of the most important and original subcultures of our time is undeniable and its influence doesn't show any signs of diminishing. "It was a futuristic movement - a movement of futuristic music, of doing new things, new drugs - a new kind of love," Van Linge tells me. "I'm not sure whether the same group of people could go through that again - maybe if you talk about different cultures - maybe from a typical Eurocentric perspective, but maybe not. The world is a lot bigger."

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The Art of Rave: why contemporary art loves rave

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The UK is on the verge of Brexit, in political deadlock, and public spending cuts continue to bite - things have definitely been better. Saying that, it was under a Thatcher government and in a similar climate of austerity, anxiety and tribulation that an important youth movement was spawned.

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- Image to express dance and its emotional impact : explore the freedom of improvised dance
- Laura’s new series circles around the notion of movement and its ability to enable us to express ourselves in full capacity.
- “It can be very freeing,” she says.

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Titled Blue Above, Laura's new series circles around the notion of movement and its ability to enable us to express ourselves in full capacity. "It can be very freeing," she says. "I felt vulnerable working in a new way like this, and also reaching out to people I didn't know to work with me." As a collection of stills, film, field recordings and a new hardback printed monograph - published by Guest Editions and officially launching on 14 November - it could be marked as Laura's most personal project to date. "I guess this is my most personal project yet because it was the only way that I could deal with difficult feelings - by expressing them in this way," she explains.

In terms of sourcing her subjects, Laura had met a casting director, named Samantha Blake Goodman, and sent her a project proposal. On the search for six local LA-based contemporary dancers, whom of which would be cast on their improvisational work, Laura found her subjects based on their "fluidity in performance," she says, and "those that felt most expressive in relation to the concept." Following the casting, she then sent a project description to the performers, joined forces with local assistant Dwayne Le Blanc - who helped source a multifarious 'blank canvas' location for the shoot - and collaborated with stylist Autumn Randolph. "I wanted the styling to feel anonymous and unbranded, making it more about movement through texture and form," she says.

As the elements of the shoot came together, as did the nature of the collaborative project - Laura asked each performer to bring their own music to dance to, aiding a personal interpretation to the brief and a free-flowing disposition of the dance choreography. "The improvised movement was based around the feeling of anxiety, expressing it as if being swept in a tornado or swimming against a current," she says. "I have often felt this way myself, and the piece itself was a way of being able to let go and move on. I wanted each performance to reflect this idea, moving through these thoughts and feelings and ending with a sense of calm and resolve."

All performances were shot on film, marking a spontaneous, unknown process and one that captures the "moments of stillness in movement" in all its raw glory. And, overall, despite these feelings of anxiety and a negative headspace, Laura hopes that her audience can pick up on the joyful tones, and that they can find refuge in the the work by perceiving it as something they can relate to.

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Addressing anxiety, Laura McCluskey's new book captures the freedom of improvised dance

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The London-based photographer's new publication, Blue Above, circles around the notion of movement and its ability to enable us to express ourselves in full capacity. "I'd been feeling overwhelmed and anxious," she says, "and so I decided to go away by myself for a month to LA."

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Dance became a new medium and language for the designer. Particularly intrigued by how dance can be used to notate movement, she delved into the history of this semiotic behaviour and how it has mutated to inform visual language today.

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Kyla Arsadjaja's cultural heritage is a key aspect of her design practice. Throughout her portfolio, traditional graphic design methods collide with Kyla's deep affection for her Indonesian upbringing, bringing together the country's rich diversity and cultural roots with print. After studying the medium in Singapore, she moved to New York back in 2016 to work as a graphic designer at an agency. Not long after this, she enrolled at the prestigious Yale School of Art of pursue an MFA, an experience which transpired to be "one of the most transformative experiences in my life," she tells us. Graduating during the height of the pandemic just last year, the post graduate degree threw up some important teachings for Kyla, discerned through lines of inquiry and various outcomes described below.

"Grad school allowed me to look beyond the traditional framework of graphic design," Kyla shares, "shaping my skills towards a media-agnostic approach." Notably, she started to incorporate dance into her practice, tapping into her Javanese cultural identity where dance is a highly prized expression of heritage. As such, dance became a new medium and language for the designer. Particularly intrigued by how dance can be used to notate movement, she delved into the history of this semiotic behaviour and how it has mutated to inform visual language today.

"I am interested in how notations are originally meant to be tools to archive dances," Kyla explains, "but will eventually get lost in translation as they are passed on." When a dance is first choreographed, it instantly becomes open to interpretation. Arguably all interpretations of an original dance have been disrupted in some respect, and it is this regeneration of choreography that Kyla continually absorbs. In turn, this sparked an intention as to how the designer can further explore this notion using design principles. "The idea behind translating movement notations as a generative process," she says, "inspired me to create my own choreographic tools which I have developed through creative writing and programming."

The resulting choreographic tools rely on metaphysical constructs that hint to the notation of movement: the poetry of incompletion, the unconditional, the anticipation of the new, the strange, the future and the unknown. As a consequence, new outputs are borne out of these resources in a number of dance-related designs. In Duet Yourself for example, Kyla interrogates the role of the mirror in dance studios - usually using a symmetry tool to achieve perfect lines in the body. Without the presence of studio mirrors due to dance studios closing in light of the pandemic, Kyla began to explore the expression of the body without the ceiling-high reflections. She learnt to trust her body which was suddenly free from the self-conscious glare of the mirror, "relying on the poetry of improvisation" as a result. "I began to acknowledge my reliance on mirrors as a hindrance instead of art. I have learned to recondition the mirror by embracing its distorted and pixelation reflected," she adds.

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Kyla Arsadjaja unites dance and design through programming and the visual notation of movement

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Creating her own choreographic tools through a variety of methods, the Indonesian designer is interested in how notations are originally meant to archive dances.

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Interview with Stef O’ Driscoll

HOW POWERFUL CAN LONDON RAVE CULTURE BE TO THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE?
Sweet Harmony Rave exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery: woman had documented her whole raving experience since her teens in diary entries, photos and flyers. How London rave culture got her through daily life. She would even talk about someone passing away, and how she had to go to Fantasia to rave it off. Rave was central to her journey.

RAVING IS A COPING MECHANISM FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE, AN ESCAPE FROM REALITY.

the raving community is a home- socialisation

DO YOU THINK THAT’S WHY LONDON ART INSTITUTIONS LIKE SAATCHI GALLERY, TATE MODERN, THEATRE PRODUCTIONS ETC. HAVE STARTED TO DOCUMENT IT?

It's really important for humans to know they’ve been seen and heard. So we know it wasn't all for nothing. That we are not alone. A lot of human experiences have not been seen: they've been oppressed. History is often told by the people in power and their version of it.

“RAVERS SAY YES TO PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD, COMING TOGETHER IN ONE SPACE TO SHARE MUSIC. RAVERS SAY YES TO THE COMMUNITY AND UNITY”.

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Meet my homegirl Stef O' Driscoll: pioneer of rave theatre and director of UK Garage Musical, WITH A LITTLE BIT OF LUCK. This week we chatted about the role London rave culture plays in our lives. Especially in art and politics, relationships and spaces. And as two intensely passionate, dedicated ravers, it's safe to say things got pretty deep!

Hey Stef! How powerful can London rave culture be to the human experience?

POWERFUL with exclamation marks!! I can't imagine who I would be without it. It's taught me so much. The London rave scene has shaped the human I am for sure, so much so I make theatre about it.

I saw something really beautiful at the Sweet Harmony Rave exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. This woman had documented her whole raving experience since her teens in diary entries, photos and flyers. How London rave culture got her through daily life. She would even talk about someone passing away, and how she had to go to Fantasia to rave it off. Rave was central to her journey.

It's so deep that raving can act as a way of dealing with grief.

Completely. I remember when my Nan was dying, Calibre was playing a six hour set in Room 3 at Fabric. That music held me in a way no person could. My way of dealing with it was standing in a rave and experiencing it there. Calibre healed me, held me. And that was the only way I could work through that grief at the time. That is why it's such an important thing.

Raving is a coping mechanism for a lot of people, an escape from reality.

Yeah, from reality and norms! In the week you have structure, you do your 9-5...and then you do it all over again.

For me, the raving community is a home. It's where I found family and friends. A place where I belong, where I learnt how to love. I didn't have another community where I was able to do that in. Apart from finding my theatre family, but that came later on. But I think it's that important for so many people.

Do you think that's why London art institutions like Saatchi Gallery, Tate Modern, theatre productions etc. have started to document it?

It's really important for humans to know they've been seen and heard. So we know it wasn't all for nothing. That we are not alone. A lot of human experiences have not been seen: they've been oppressed. History is often told by the people in power and their version of it.

Now we're in a really exciting time where more people from all walks of life are able to tell their stories. Whether it be online, through theatre, art exhibitions, in the making of audiobooks like by Brian Belle Fortune. Our experiences aren't just documented by those in power anymore. Thank fuck.

Right?! Thank fuck. And isn't this exactly what you're doing with rave theatre?

Yeah, I made WITH A LITTLE BIT OF LUCK with Sabrina Mahfouz as an antidote to that. So ravers could feel comfortable in theatres. Without having to pay bare money and then not even be allowed to have a beer or go to the toilet during the performance because you wouldn't be let back in.

It was important to us that the people me and Sabrina raved with could experience a story and relate to it. That they could see a version of themselves on the stage. People could identify with the main character, who LOVED raving. People connected to what it meant to love and then lose that love on a dance floor. They connected with the characters' hopes and dreams and the hustle to achieve those ambitions. And what threaded it all together was a banging nostalgic UKG soundtrack.

How do you think ravers feel in other high art institutions outside these spaces you've crafted?

It's incredible to see your raving crew go to see an orchestra playing Goldie's album Timeless at Southbank, and getting proper dressed up and wearing shirts! It's a different experience, and it feels special to see your community being represented and documented in that way.

But I also struggle with the purpose of it. If it helps people understand why our culture exists, it's beauty and it's importance and it's contextualised then I'm all for it. But if it becomes like "poverty porn", serving up caricatures for voyeuristic audiences then I'm not sure if I want to share it with those people. So I struggle.

It's also a funny contradiction when you look outside the art world and think about the government's attitude towards London nightclubs.

Couple of years ago Fabric got shut down. Luckily it reopened, but it now has an extra 32 laws it has to abide by, and there's this airport security. That makes the club really hard to function. But imagine if we were to celebrate it in the way that Berlin celebrates it. It's seen as high art there, to the point where the nightclubs pay lower taxes to the government.

Which is right, because if you look at what makes up a dance floor, ravers say yes to the free movement of people.

Ravers say yes to forward thinking and some to recreational drug taking, and that is a part of it. But in the UK, that is everything that our government doesn't want to be a part of.

Where do you think the London raving community will go next, then, if the system pushes our communities out of nightclubs?

I was chatting with Bailey about this. Maybe next we're gonna have more clubs on the M25. Having rave experiences that aren't in the heart of London, where people in really expensive flats aren't complaining about the noise. Clubs will go where there's no sound limitations. Where there's more freedom: more old school rebel anarchy vibe to it. Where we can play in a way that we want to.

Ahaha so we can play!!! That's exactly it.

So we can play! So we can fuckin have a good time. That's all we want. Just have a good time to process all the fuckery that is going on.

Amen to that. Please keep doing what you're doing and creating relatable artistic spaces for ravers to tell their stories and be represented! Big up you queen... And see you in the dance! ;)

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Why is Rave Culture Important? - RAVE REPORT

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Meet my homegirl Stef O' Driscoll: pioneer of rave theatre and director of UK Garage Musical, WITH A LITTLE BIT OF LUCK. This week we chatted about the role London rave culture plays in our lives. Especially in art and politics, relationships and spaces.

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I so-Ahola's (1982) motivation theory

‘Escapism is an inescapable component of human thought and culture’ -Tuan, 1998

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WHY WE RAVE? THE HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND ATTENDING A MUSIC FESTIVAL

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WHY WE RAVE? THE HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND ATTENDING A MUSIC FESTIVAL

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What is it that draws us to these musical gatherings?

The most commonly reported motivator to head for a music festival is event novelty, escape, and opportunities for socialization(1).

Abreu-Novais, M., & Arcodia, C. (2013). Music festival motivators for attendance: Developing an agenda for research. International Journal of Event Management Research, 8(1), 34-48.

Humans have a tendency to escape. Iso-Ahola's (1982) motivation theory suggests individuals are driven by the desire to escape their everyday environment(3).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0047287506291592

Attending a festival lets us immerse ourselves into the world with removed social pressures, and no expectations; we leave our everyday responsibilities of work or school.

Socialization, the desire to interact with known and unknown individuals; is the most common motivator reported for attending musical events. Also, being among others is a socially innate and healthy behavior; isolation is against your nature. See opportunities for positive socialization interactions are rare occurrences in our day-to-day lives, but at a festival it is frequent.

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EDM.com - The Latest Electronic Dance Music News, Reviews & Artists

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Hello, readers of EDM.com, my name is Noah Little; a music psychology enthusiast who will be providing you with current knowledge on the science of music. Yes, people can study music psychology for a living, or at least for their master's degree, as I did.

The first topic to be explored is the human motivation behind why we attend music festivals in the first place. What is it that draws us to these musical gatherings? What is pushing our fellow electronic music lovers to keep showing up year after year to these shows? Music psychology researchers have uncovered various factors that lead people to attend a local club or a massive show such as Tomorrowland or Ultra Music Festival. The most commonly reported motivator to head for a music festival is event novelty, escape, and opportunities for socialization(1).

First, is novelty or an out of the ordinary experience. It is an enjoyable event that happens periodically, and you create an abundance of anticipation before it(2). In the case of large music festivals, this unique experience is often once per year. Ever find yourself counting down the weeks or days before a show? Human enjoy novelty, this is why we change cars, purchase new clothes, and look for new restaurants to eat at.

Recall the first EDM event you attended. Seeing neon dressed individuals with illuminated fingertips was likely your first time experiencing these activities. Watching the opening song of your favorite DJ and seeing the crowd go wild; was also a new experience. But, after a few shows, this novelty wore off. You weren't as excited anymore; you knew what to expect. So what does one do? Often people seek out either smaller boutique festivals for an intimate experience, or larger shows for the enhanced production, activities, and artists it attracts. Simultaneously, the producers of these festivals want to outdo themselves and each other every year. EDC improves each year, and new things added. Holy Ship, is a rave on a cruise boat, Electric Forest (party in the forest), and Sensations white is a unique experience. All of which is trying to provide a new experience for the festival goer. On the whole, this promise and expectation of novelty at these events is an attempt to remove the individuals from their typical experiences in day-to-day life. This exciting and unique event is what draws us to these shows and leads to our second motivator, escapism.

Humans have a tendency to escape. Iso-Ahola's (1982) motivation theory suggests individuals are driven by the desire to escape their everyday environment(3). Movies, drugs, vacations; are all a temporary change of our realities, a way to forget about our worries and woes. Attending a festival lets us immerse ourselves into the world with removed social pressures, and no expectations; we leave our everyday responsibilities of work or school. Importantly, EDM fans don't care if you have a purple mohawk and are half-naked. Similarly, you can be a senior citizen wearing a full business suit, and everyone will respect you the same. Perhaps that is part of the PLUR culture, but also I believe it is the people who are there. There exists a mutual understanding to escape from the day to day grind and societies view of acceptability. Interestingly, a music festival investigation in China found that its patrons (people who attend) were motivated to go to the festival as they were able to escape their oppressive society of the Chinese state. For instance, some participations at this Chinese festival reported it was their first time they were able to express their affection in public for their same-sex partner(4). These types of environments are supplying individuals with a chance to escape from it all; a place where people feel free to express whom they are, what they love, and without the judgmental eyes of society.

Lastly, socialization, the desire to interact with known and unknown individuals; is the most common motivator reported for attending musical events. Also, being among others is a socially innate and healthy behavior; isolation is against your nature. Going to a festival with friends, family, and meeting new strangers are all part of the socialization aspect of the music festival(5). What an experience it is to have with friends and loved ones; but also with a group of friendly and welcoming strangers. For the most part, all attendees are on the same wave-length, wanting to have a memorable time, and experience the music festival in its entirety. It isn't uncommon to exchange numbers, become instant friends, and share Kandi bracelets with others; there are no barriers of races, class, and occupations. There are only people. This social experience is part of the magic that these festivals produce. A sense of camaraderie. It is similar to a sports event, but everyone is on the same team, and there are no losers. The commonality between everyone at the event, singing, and dancing to the same song is a special feeling; almost indescribable at times because of the genuine connection felt among the crowd. These opportunities for positive socialization interactions are rare occurrences in our day-to-day lives, but at a festival it is frequent. These social processes are potentially creating additional allurement to these musical events, contributing to the explosion of electronic dance music festivals globally. As Above and Beyond says, we're all we need.

I hope this first article outlining the human desire to have new experiences, escape reality, and socialize with others at a music festival was of interest to many of you. I look forward to comments, questions, and topics you would like to see for upcoming articles.

I'll see you soon,

Noah

Sources:

1. Abreu-Novais, M., & Arcodia, C. (2013). Music festival motivators for attendance: Developing an agenda for research. International Journal of Event Management Research, 8(1), 34-48.

Readable version here: http://www.ijemr.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/10/Abr...

2. Faulkner, B., Fredline, E., Larson, M., & Tomljenovic, R. (1999). A marketing analysis of Sweden's storsjoyran music festival. Tourism Analysis, 4(3), 157-171.

Abstract here:
http://www.sciepub.com/reference/94464
3. Iso-Ahola, S. E. (1982). Toward a social psychological theory of tourism motivation: A rejoinder. Annuals of Tourism Research, 9, 256-62.

An article discussing this motivation theory here:
http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1877042814065859/1-s2.0-S18...
4. Li, Y.-N., & Wood, E. H. (2014). Music festival motivation in China: free the mind. Leisure Studies, 1-20.

5. Ballantyne, J., Ballantyne, R., & Packer, J. (2013). Designing and managing music festival experiences to enhance attendees' psychological and social benefits. Musicae Scientiae, 18(1), 65-83.

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Why We Rave? The Human Psychology Behind Attending a Music Festival

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Hello, readers of EDM.com, my name is Noah Little; a music psychology enthusiast who will be providing you with current knowledge on the science of music. Yes, people can study music psychology for a living, or at least for their master's degree, as I did.

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create a welcoming space to start conversation on this forever secretive and euphoric scene.

‘Escapism is an inescapable component of human thought and culture’ -Tuan, 1998

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esearching and designing for social change.

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AcknowledgementUAL Graduate Showcase was madepossible in 2020 with the support of IBM

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https://graduateshowcase.arts.ac.uk/projects/196994/cover

joyful communication design can be used to facilitate social progress.

Inspired by activist magazine design, I set out to discover how my designs can be a form of feminist education.

joy became my method of engaging with my audience, encouraging a positive growth mindset.

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https://graduateshowcase.arts.ac.uk/projects/208161/cover

I value the power of emotions and vulnerability within graphic design. I care about making work that through empathy becomes useful to a specific audience. This audience today is womxn.

How can exposing women's experiences under patriarchy help empower them?

tackle the matter of gender inequality, attempting to construct gazes of emotion and solidarity

the representation of women within patriarchal societies is altered

breaking down the male gaze.

aims to create a more equal future and space where emotions are used as a positive tool for social reform

value collaboration with others and to use contemporary ways of consciousness raising to expose and empower women

the exposure of women’s experiences under patriarchy to empower them as my field of practic

essential and urgent to extend the notion of female gaze into a counter gaze, creating a more inclusive space

a healing effect for individuals who face intersecting layers of oppression.

the possibility of creating work that achieves empathy within the oppressors and creates solidarity between the oppressed

xpresses the frustration of not feeling listened to because of gender - as a woman.

https://graduateshowcase.arts.ac.uk/projects/227382/cover

try and disconnect audiences from the toxic stereotypes the media have been feeding us for generations about women

how women have been represented in different forms of media whether that be in film, TV, magazines, social media, etc.

I examined theories like Laura Mulvey's 'Male Gaze Theory', and Stuart Hall's 'Representation Theory' as well as looking at artists like Cindy Sherman to help inform my opinions and ideas.

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Inspired by Yoni workshop

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Elsewhere, club graphics were characterised by garish palettes and nods to psychedelia. The application of intense, vibrantly coloured patterns was common as an easy visual reference to the experience of tripping. While designers were likely basing designs on their own psychedelic experimentation, there’s a science in using pattern as signifier. In 1926, German and American psychologist Heinrich Klüver studied the effects of hallucinogenic substances on users, and noted that the visuals they experienced were often recurring geometric patterns—dubbed “form constants”—in “highly saturated colors.”

The sense of freedom and a wilful naivety in approaching graphics is what made the imagery of rave culture so pure, fresh, and enduringly striking. There were no rules, but plenty of hedonism

For a few short years, design experienced a sort of chemically enhanced utopia that modern graphic designers are now trying to recapture.

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"There was a certain freedom that came from evading the baggage of tradition and history," says Nav Haq in his introduction to Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture. "Ultimately, this unbridled creativity is what brought out the energetic feeling of rave."

Feelings of freedom from precedents and "unbridled creativity" are some of the most powerful ingredients for groundbreaking graphic design. Rave culture brought about an almost universal graphic language, which in the decades since its first incarnation has become inextricably bound to its origins, yet transcendent of them.

Rave posters of the 1980s and 90s demonstrated a joyful disregard for convention as did anti-design tropes for punk in previous decades. Type was brash and bold, colors a retina-burning neon, and imagery-like the sounds and samples pervading the scene-delinquently cut and pasted together. These original designs served a purpose that's become all but redundant in today's world of online promotion: telling people the wheres, whens, and hows of the party. Palettes were bright to reflect their revellers; type was large enough to be read in a chemical daze.

Commercial director of branding consultancy Bugler Smith Paul Gosling (no relation to me) has worked with numerous dance music clients in the past, and founded the site Crazy Animal Face, which looks at links between design and illustration and music. Today, he says, artists and clubs aren't so much looking for posters, but for shareable digital content.

"When you see posters today, they're created as collectible gig memorabilia. When you walk through the streets and see them, they're really just reaffirming what you've already been emailed by promoters or ticketing sites. The whole rave sound is very prevalent right now, but there's a whole generation that doesn't know it was a thing before. We still have that poster art, but it's more of a thing that you could download and use as a phone background."

When posters were necessarily cryptic, they inspired some of the most interesting graphic design treatments and illustrations, that in time, became a visual shorthand for rave. The most recognizable of these is, of course, the smiley. This cheerful little yellow symbol first emerged in the 1960s, and while its parentage is much contested, the story goes that it was first seen in 1963 on American children's TV programme The Funny Company. In the same year Massachusetts-based commercial artist Harvey Ball designed a smiley icon for State Mutual Life Assurance, but didn't copyright the design. David Stern, a designer from Seattle, also claimed he'd created it, and until this day its true authorship remains unproven.

The design shot to wider recognition in the 1970s when Philadelphian brothers Bernard and Murray Spain paired the smiley with the slogan "have a nice day" on badges, selling at least 50 million in 1972 alone. The icon's place as the face of rave was secured when in 1988, Bomb the Bass lifted it from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' hit comic , and slapped it onto the cover of their single Beat Dis. Promoter and DJ Danny Rampling had already used it on his flyers for Shoom, and soon the round yellow icon had morphed between summer of love, pin badge, evil nemesis, and finally to club culture icon. It's been appropriated repeatedly since, with agencies like Wonder Room making it pink and surprised in its promotional posters for Manchester's Soup Kitchen venue.

Elsewhere, club graphics were characterised by garish palettes and nods to psychedelia. The application of intense, vibrantly coloured patterns was common as an easy visual reference to the experience of tripping. While designers were likely basing designs on their own psychedelic experimentation, there's a science in using pattern as signifier. In 1926, German and American psychologist Heinrich Klüver studied the effects of hallucinogenic substances on users, and noted that the visuals they experienced were often recurring geometric patterns-dubbed "form constants"-in "highly saturated colors." This is mimicked in club imagery past and present, and perhaps best demonstrated in Chelsea Louise Berlin's Hard Times graphic, which makes the pupils dilate in even the most sober viewer.

The influence of these works is now seen in modern designers' client work, as well as more personal party poster designs, like those of Hanse van Halem, who takes a magic eye approach to typography for clients including Wired Germany and Galerie Block C in Groningen.

Gosling sees strong links between original rave designs and today's commercial graphic design. "If you look at the 2012 Olympics identity and its font design [by Wolff Olins], for me that's just 90s rave culture," he says. "Rave aesthetics clearly set a trend for hyper density, overlays, and that movement towards bold designs and patterns. I remember nostalgically thinking about things like having multicolored dots on your face at Global Gathering, and that's all back in now. Even the bucket hats."

Alongside the neons and questionable headwear, the distinctive mode of collage spearheaded by rave culture print graphics and club visuals has seen a revival in recent times. "We're seeing a lot of that photo-mashup thing; taking elements from different places and sticking them together," Gosling says. "I don't want to use the word 'analog' because I'd sound like a dick, but there's something in taking loads of photos and paint, and slapping it on a page which seems like really passionate design."

French design agencyGerman designer Alles Gut's work for Laurent Garnier uses similar ideas of appropriating pop-art imagery and icons, as does another French agency Mark Bohle's poster designs for clubs also nod to rave culture past, with a mix of surreal imagery, bright colours and hand-drawn type that creates beguiling and unusual final pieces. Twice Studio's adaptable identity for art and music festival Baleapop.

At the mainstream end of the spectrum London agency Zak Group has just unveiled its typographic designs for Frank Ocean's new visual album, Blond, released with an accompanying magazine, Boys Don't Cry. The type treatment is a 21st Century version of rave culture's off-the-cuff, cheaply reproduced imagery, utilizing lettering warped by repeated scanning, the glyphs deliciously morphing into one another, their colors forming a grotesquely beautiful prism of tones.

Thanks to the nature of early raves-mostly underground, often illegal-little photographic evidence has survived of revellers, despite how recent the movement. As such, alongside the fashion, the most visible and distinct visual reference points of the era are its fluorescent graphic signifiers. These frequently make their way into today's contemporary art, as in Jeremy Deller's wry Bless This Acid House print, which manages to straddle alternative drug culture and prosaic domesticity. During the mid-90s, the artist also created a series of posters promoting fictional events; one advertised an exhibition on acid house at the Tate gallery in Liverpool, which of course never existed.

Recently, Deller worked with London-based graphic designer Fraser Muggeridge on the identity for the city's Utopia exhibition at Somerset House. The visual language was centred round a pink and yellow smiley icon, a telling move that proves the pervasive nature of rave's imagery on today's graphic storytelling.

The sense of freedom and a wilful naivety in approaching graphics is what made the imagery of rave culture so pure, fresh, and enduringly striking. There were no rules, but plenty of hedonism. Walter Van Beirendonck, a Belgian fashion designer whose outré outfits came to define late 80s club dress, tells an interviewer for Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture, "The only limitation was the technical one. We had to search for things, to find solutions...It was a strong feeling of freedom I had at that time." From the effervescent sampling in the music, hand-me-down fashion to the eye-watering posters and flyers, there's a sense that nothing was visually off-limits. For a few short years, design experienced a sort of chemically enhanced utopia that modern graphic designers are now trying to recapture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Rave Culture Is Teaching Modern Graphic Designers

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"There was a certain freedom that came from evading the baggage of tradition and history," says Nav Haq in his introduction to Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture. "Ultimately, this unbridled creativity is what brought out the energetic feeling of rave." Feelings of freedom from precedents an

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“Ultimately, this unbridled creativity is what brought out the energetic feeling of rave.”

Rave culture brought about an almost universal graphic language, which in the decades since its first incarnation has become inextricably bound to its origins, yet transcendent of them.

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"There was a certain freedom that came from evading the baggage of tradition and history," says Nav Haq in his introduction to Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture. "Ultimately, this unbridled creativity is what brought out the energetic feeling of rave."

Feelings of freedom from precedents and "unbridled creativity" are some of the most powerful ingredients for groundbreaking graphic design. Rave culture brought about an almost universal graphic language, which in the decades since its first incarnation has become inextricably bound to its origins, yet transcendent of them.

Rave posters of the 1980s and 90s demonstrated a joyful disregard for convention as did anti-design tropes for punk in previous decades. Type was brash and bold, colors a retina-burning neon, and imagery-like the sounds and samples pervading the scene-delinquently cut and pasted together. These original designs served a purpose that's become all but redundant in today's world of online promotion: telling people the wheres, whens, and hows of the party. Palettes were bright to reflect their revellers; type was large enough to be read in a chemical daze.

Commercial director of branding consultancy Bugler Smith Paul Gosling (no relation to me) has worked with numerous dance music clients in the past, and founded the site Crazy Animal Face, which looks at links between design and illustration and music. Today, he says, artists and clubs aren't so much looking for posters, but for shareable digital content.

"When you see posters today, they're created as collectible gig memorabilia. When you walk through the streets and see them, they're really just reaffirming what you've already been emailed by promoters or ticketing sites. The whole rave sound is very prevalent right now, but there's a whole generation that doesn't know it was a thing before. We still have that poster art, but it's more of a thing that you could download and use as a phone background."

When posters were necessarily cryptic, they inspired some of the most interesting graphic design treatments and illustrations, that in time, became a visual shorthand for rave. The most recognizable of these is, of course, the smiley. This cheerful little yellow symbol first emerged in the 1960s, and while its parentage is much contested, the story goes that it was first seen in 1963 on American children's TV programme The Funny Company. In the same year Massachusetts-based commercial artist Harvey Ball designed a smiley icon for State Mutual Life Assurance, but didn't copyright the design. David Stern, a designer from Seattle, also claimed he'd created it, and until this day its true authorship remains unproven.

The design shot to wider recognition in the 1970s when Philadelphian brothers Bernard and Murray Spain paired the smiley with the slogan "have a nice day" on badges, selling at least 50 million in 1972 alone. The icon's place as the face of rave was secured when in 1988, Bomb the Bass lifted it from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' hit comic , and slapped it onto the cover of their single Beat Dis. Promoter and DJ Danny Rampling had already used it on his flyers for Shoom, and soon the round yellow icon had morphed between summer of love, pin badge, evil nemesis, and finally to club culture icon. It's been appropriated repeatedly since, with agencies like Wonder Room making it pink and surprised in its promotional posters for Manchester's Soup Kitchen venue.

Elsewhere, club graphics were characterised by garish palettes and nods to psychedelia. The application of intense, vibrantly coloured patterns was common as an easy visual reference to the experience of tripping. While designers were likely basing designs on their own psychedelic experimentation, there's a science in using pattern as signifier. In 1926, German and American psychologist Heinrich Klüver studied the effects of hallucinogenic substances on users, and noted that the visuals they experienced were often recurring geometric patterns-dubbed "form constants"-in "highly saturated colors." This is mimicked in club imagery past and present, and perhaps best demonstrated in Chelsea Louise Berlin's Hard Times graphic, which makes the pupils dilate in even the most sober viewer.

The influence of these works is now seen in modern designers' client work, as well as more personal party poster designs, like those of Hanse van Halem, who takes a magic eye approach to typography for clients including Wired Germany and Galerie Block C in Groningen.

Gosling sees strong links between original rave designs and today's commercial graphic design. "If you look at the 2012 Olympics identity and its font design [by Wolff Olins], for me that's just 90s rave culture," he says. "Rave aesthetics clearly set a trend for hyper density, overlays, and that movement towards bold designs and patterns. I remember nostalgically thinking about things like having multicolored dots on your face at Global Gathering, and that's all back in now. Even the bucket hats."

Alongside the neons and questionable headwear, the distinctive mode of collage spearheaded by rave culture print graphics and club visuals has seen a revival in recent times. "We're seeing a lot of that photo-mashup thing; taking elements from different places and sticking them together," Gosling says. "I don't want to use the word 'analog' because I'd sound like a dick, but there's something in taking loads of photos and paint, and slapping it on a page which seems like really passionate design."

French design agencyGerman designer Alles Gut's work for Laurent Garnier uses similar ideas of appropriating pop-art imagery and icons, as does another French agency Mark Bohle's poster designs for clubs also nod to rave culture past, with a mix of surreal imagery, bright colours and hand-drawn type that creates beguiling and unusual final pieces. Twice Studio's adaptable identity for art and music festival Baleapop.

At the mainstream end of the spectrum London agency Zak Group has just unveiled its typographic designs for Frank Ocean's new visual album, Blond, released with an accompanying magazine, Boys Don't Cry. The type treatment is a 21st Century version of rave culture's off-the-cuff, cheaply reproduced imagery, utilizing lettering warped by repeated scanning, the glyphs deliciously morphing into one another, their colors forming a grotesquely beautiful prism of tones.

Thanks to the nature of early raves-mostly underground, often illegal-little photographic evidence has survived of revellers, despite how recent the movement. As such, alongside the fashion, the most visible and distinct visual reference points of the era are its fluorescent graphic signifiers. These frequently make their way into today's contemporary art, as in Jeremy Deller's wry Bless This Acid House print, which manages to straddle alternative drug culture and prosaic domesticity. During the mid-90s, the artist also created a series of posters promoting fictional events; one advertised an exhibition on acid house at the Tate gallery in Liverpool, which of course never existed.

Recently, Deller worked with London-based graphic designer Fraser Muggeridge on the identity for the city's Utopia exhibition at Somerset House. The visual language was centred round a pink and yellow smiley icon, a telling move that proves the pervasive nature of rave's imagery on today's graphic storytelling.

The sense of freedom and a wilful naivety in approaching graphics is what made the imagery of rave culture so pure, fresh, and enduringly striking. There were no rules, but plenty of hedonism. Walter Van Beirendonck, a Belgian fashion designer whose outré outfits came to define late 80s club dress, tells an interviewer for Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture, "The only limitation was the technical one. We had to search for things, to find solutions...It was a strong feeling of freedom I had at that time." From the effervescent sampling in the music, hand-me-down fashion to the eye-watering posters and flyers, there's a sense that nothing was visually off-limits. For a few short years, design experienced a sort of chemically enhanced utopia that modern graphic designers are now trying to recapture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Rave Culture Is Teaching Modern Graphic Designers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"There was a certain freedom that came from evading the baggage of tradition and history," says Nav Haq in his introduction to Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture. "Ultimately, this unbridled creativity is what brought out the energetic feeling of rave." Feelings of freedom from precedents an

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Access to the history of music through platforms such as Youtube, Discogs, and Spotify, have lead to these histories having a much more prominent affect on our present, and have helped to glorify and fetishise the history of musical styles like rave, to almost religious levels. I began to explore the similarities between raving and religion, the act of a group of like-minded people gathering in a large space to share in the experience of praise, to close their eyes, raise their arms and feel the love, peace and unity through their body. Each of my projects explores the influence of the digital and the internet on the fetishisation of rave in a different way, through the juxtaposition of the digitally-influenced theme and the analogue form of animation, or the circumstantial parallels between images from raving and religion.

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View this year’s showcase on graduateshowcase.arts.ac.uk

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Words like “inclusive” and “community” ring true to every facet of what a lot of Toronto DJ’s hope to achieve when creating intentional spaces. However, the buzz around “inclusive marketing” can sometimes be used as more of a tool than an act of kindness. In techno and house specifically, the way design layouts in flyers display the hierarchy in line-ups is still extremely problematic, especially when the women or queer people being booked are still being overshadowed completely by white male DJs. “There’s still a huge problem in the electronic scene with promoters booking locals and having their name in tiny font on the poster with a huge headliner over the top of it,” says Chippy, discussing some issues with bookings in the techno scene. “My idea of community is even if you have a huge headliner on the flyer, your design should highlight everyone on their bill equally. Pep Rally’s mission with our design is to uplift our DJ community, all while simultaneously shining light on the headliner.”

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Looking ahead to Red Bull Music Festival Toronto, the Encounters showcase this Friday October 18th will bring an eclectic roster of local and international DJs together for a multi-room rave at industrial art-deco incinerator The Symes, featuring production design by SSpS. It's the perfect marriage of the sounds that represent Toronto, its global club connections and the beauty the underground can achieve with the right opportunity.

A city like Toronto has a lot of unique visual voices, all of which lend something different to the experiential component of their parties. Toronto producer Bambii's event JERK has become globally recognized because of her striking visual brand of beauty and empowerment for QTBIPOC folks. Bubbly fonts, sometimes flaming or liquified, swim luminously over photos of black and brown bodies displayed glowing unabashedly. The vibrant contrast, the actions, all those and more combined in a graphic help tell the story of what happens when Bambii eventually hits the decks and when host Bobby Bowen hits the mic. It's dancefloor chaos, booty popping handstands and a room full of people not afraid to have fun.

That visual story can be really important when you're trying to establish something meaningful. Discwoman member and co-founder of Toronto music label Parallel Minds, Ciel believes that graphic design can be a tool that not only solidifies your brand, but helps tie in all the other aspects of your party. "Parties like JERK in Toronto and Papi Juice in New York, these parties are visually memorable and interesting because there's a good idea from inception that sticks with those same visual cues every single time. That's how something becomes iconic," she says. "I don't necessarily feel like you need to have the same visual look to create that identity or to build a successful party, but in order to elevate your party to beyond a party, I do think that probably needs to happen."

Ciel and multidisciplinary artist/DJ Chippy Nonstop are two women who've worked larger scale events like this, but have also had to learn to rough through the harder sides of D.I.Y curation. Giving us a better understanding of what makes a visual voice so effective, both women navigate different facets of creating with intention. Both artists question how creative partnerships like Encounters can exist outside the narrative of gentrification and what visual branding does for their efforts in underground nightlife.

Design, production & packaging

As one half of Pep Rally with Karim Olen Ash, Chippy Nonstop has been the face of some of the most experiential events of the summer. With a successful DJ workshop Intersessions under her belt and a storied reputation of turning the club up, it's never a shock to attend a perfectly executed party, right down to the intricate details of the space. "For my birthday rave with LSDXOXO, we literally found this bright orange wire that we used all around the DJ booth," Chippy says. "We're always on a budget, so anything we can find to bring it together visually we'll use."

More notable parties from the Pep Rally series included events with Total Freedom and LSDXOXO. In both events, the use of bold, crimson lights and flashing strobes created a strangely heightened environment, blending calming and chaotic elements together that speak to the artist style and their collective brand as event producers. "With Total Freedom, the design cues all come from the artists aesthetic. I wanted the graphics to feel as deconstructed as the music itself," she says. I'm definitely inspired by 90s rave design and simple fonts, anything that's distorted in a way. But with Pep Rally, it's more about looking at the line-up and letting every flyer or graphic act as the visual component of the party, it's sound and the community behind it."

She explains, "People go out raving because they want to forget about their troubles and leave the bullshit at the door. People want to feel safe enough to lose themselves. I feel like in order for that to work, the dimmer the dance floor, the better." Originally part of the collective It's Not U It's Me, Ciel likes a more collaborative design effort, working closely with designers and artists to make something special. "Before we even get into the design of the party, I usually send out a brief to my graphic designer with a link to the artists' past releases, so they can see what the aesthetic is," she says. "The ideal situation is when we can marry their aesthetic, my designers aesthetic and what I like to create something that's collectively ours."

Marketing values through visuals

Another huge part of the problem she highlights is the division between techno vs club DJs. Amongst techno purists, it seems very rare that the two worlds meet in promotion or in bookings themselves. "One thing I like about New York is that there's a lot of intermingling between techno and club music spaces. My friend Shyboi is a good example of someone who marries techno and club sounds in the perfect way. I have a feeling that a lot of this boils down to segregation in different parts of the world," she continues more in-depth. "I think there's this attitude among house and techno purists that club music isn't serious music because there's more of a disregard for melding genres. They have a very specific idea of what those genres should sound like and those ideas are generally very conservative and not forward thinking. I think the male techno contingent of the world, beyond not booking women, is not very good at thinking outside of the box in terms of promoting diversity."

"The Secret Location" as a promotion tool

Creative partnerships looking ahead

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Toronto's nightlife hues: Examining design's relationship to rave culture

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Looking ahead to Red Bull Music Festival Toronto, the Encounters showcase this Friday October 18th will bring an eclectic roster of local and international DJs together for a multi-room rave at industrial art-deco incinerator The Symes, featuring production design by SSpS.

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Fed up with government hypocrisy, young people are escaping to the countryside in pursuit of freedom and release. Photographer Laurence Ellis documents the outdoor parties where communitarian spirit rages on

"Waiting until midnight to find out where it's going to be. Getting in the car and trundling off to wherever the fuck you're going. All of this worry-is it going to be good? What's going to happen? And then you get there, and you get fucked off your face, you have a great time.... The sun comes up and you're there with your mates in a beautiful place. Going to a rave is, in my opinion, one of the most intense things you can do in the UK." So says Harry, a 22-year-old rig (sound system) owner from Sheffield.

In 2020, going to a free party-a ticketless, multi-night outdoor rave-has taken on a countercultural significance that reaches beyond the most subversive dreams of an anti-authority raver in the halcyon days of the late '80s. In the throes of a global pandemic, the ominous portent of COVID transmission poses a genuine moral dilemma for the nightlife scene not seen since the AIDS crisis-one made all the more polarizing by an echo of the sensationalism that dominated the public discourse about raves in the '90s. Hypocrisy and double standards from UK government officials ride roughshod on the back of years of austerity, uncertainty, and struggle, and with pubs across the country resuming business as usual, the mandate to "Stay Home, Save Lives" rings hollow for a swath of young people who draw much of the meaning and joy in their lives from the communion of the rave.

It's easy to see why those only socializing within their own age group and in the lowest risk category for the virus would shrug their shoulders at any perceived doubts around safety, dial up the party line, and drive off into the night in pursuit of a beautiful, tangible experience. "The vast majority of people at a rave are between the ages of about 16 and 23," says Mr. Shindig, a 26-year-old DJ and scene documenter from Somerset in the Southwest. "Most of the people there are young. Most [have] it rough. You'll never own a house, your job's on a zero-hours contract, all that rubbish. Most of them are not long out of education, and that's a very hierarchical system with the relationship between you and the teachers and the other students. And then you come to this place, and it feels like everyone is exactly the same, nobody's a boss. Everyone's on a level.

"In the pub, there's no rules, but it's the social [expectations]... you're supposed to buy a drink, you're supposed to dress up, you're supposed to have your mate to go with," Shindig explains. "If you go to a free party, you can go with not a penny on you. You can just be there for the vibes. It's very inclusionary."

Finding out about parties is not a straightforward process; participants are vigilant about bad actors and undercover police, and a recent crackdown from the authorities has added a new level of urgency to the scene's already clandestine nature. Under the banner of the Coronavirus Act, the UK government moved to impose £10,000 fines on party organizers. This has kept some people away from raves, but it's also galvanized the attitude of those betrothed to the subculture: The stakes are higher for everyone, and passing someone a phone line (the primary means of discovering a location) is a solemn act of trust only granted to those deemed 'safe heads.' It's redolent of the scenes in the '90s, when the Criminal Justice Act was imposed to outlaw unlicensed raving and move dance music culture into licensed clubs and events.

Despite the covert nature of the scene, it's also a community that prides itself on acceptance. "There's proper hippies and road men, you know?" says Annabelle, a 22-year-old illustrator and raver from Bristol. "You'll see guys in puffer jackets and people with dreadlocks down to the floor. There is every type of person, but everyone's really nice to each other for that little set time. It's like a community that forms for a few days.

"Even though it's illegal-there's no police, there's no law, there's no one in charge-the people who run the sound system will look after you. If anything happens, they will make sure it's sorted out. I feel a lot safer walking around by myself at a party than I do going out at night in town. I'm a girl, and I'm small, and I've walked around a party mashed, speaking to random people, on my own, loads of times, and I feel totally safe. But if I was on a night out in town, and I left my friends for more than 10 minutes, I would not feel safe."

"In the past, [we had] places like community centers, and I think our society is really missing these now. I think the prevalence of free parties [during the pandemic] is a response to the loss of spaces for people to come and socialize and be equal with each other."

Emily, 22, from Leeds agrees. "I've seen more antisocial behavior in clubs and bars from people drinking than I have at any party I've been to. I feel like the sexual harassment women face in those places gets ignored, and they have bouncers and staff who are paid to keep you safe. No one's ever sexually harassed me at a free party."

Contravening the popular public presentation of raves as lawless, chaotic orgies, the free party scene operates by its own unwritten code of ethics, which ranges from drug welfare ("We're all experienced drug users, we know when to call an ambulance," says Harry) to respect for the land they access ("We stay behind afterward to try to leave the place spotless," says Annabelle). They prize acceptance of all people within the community, although it's undoubtedly a predominantly white scene. That, according to Emily, is largely down to the rural location of the parties, away from larger populations of ethnic minorities. While most of the surface-level discussion about the parties focuses on hedonistic pleasure-seeking and social interaction, there are other ideas at play in an act which can't help but be political in nature.

"I think a lot about the concept of 'third spaces,' " says Harry. "It's basically talking about spaces where people are equal. In the past, [we had] places like community centers, and I think our society is really missing these now. I think the prevalence of free parties [during the pandemic] is a response to the loss of spaces for people to come and socialize and be equal with each other, and just feel like they can be free and talk to someone."

'Third spaces' inescapably have a more vital function for those living without the luxury of privilege. As more municipal buildings and outdoor areas are sold off to private entities, people without the means to define their own spaces are left with few places to go other than the home they rent or the place they work. In that light, the value of the space created by a free party becomes deeper for those who join in. Class isn't a defining factor amongst the mixed crowd at a party, but this temporary claiming of space purposefully kicks back against an increasingly privatized landscape and provides a much needed sense of agency for those often at the mercy of capitalism's land grab.

"A lot of people who go to these parties are a very specific breed of individual," Harry adds. "They tend to be quite smart. They tend to have drug issues, and they tend to be depressed or anxious. And I think that these things are a response to wider society now."

Even before the pandemic, when a free party was almost guaranteed to be taking place every single weekend somewhere in the UK, the erosion of public spaces-coupled with conservative austerity policies -had cut a swath through many aspects of British society. Funding cuts to education and youth-oriented programs had collided head-on with looming environmental crises and a pervading sense of fatalism; for many young people, the arrival of the pandemic has only exacerbated an already fragile state of mind.

"This pandemic has affected millennials and Gen Z so much," says Emily. "Every part of our life, our careers, people's education...the government has done massive u-turns on things, and fucked up people's A-level exams. People were graduating university from their bedrooms after spending, like, £9,500 on their degree.

"Downers are definitely a way bigger thing [in the party scene] now, like K [ketamine], Xanax, all that stuff that makes you feel really numb. That plays a part in us switching off, because it's just like, you unlock your phone and there's all this horrible stuff going on. All the racism in America, Brexit, and coronavirus, to name but a few, and I feel like numbing drugs are definitely more popular."

"The way everything has happened in the world has changed people's perspectives. It made a lot of people think, 'This is the sort of thing that used to give my life a lot of meaning, used to fill my life with a lot of energy and people and wholesomeness.'"

While other 'party' drugs such as MDMA, cocaine, and speed still keep people dancing for long stretches at free parties, the prevalence of sedatives points to a way to detach from modern life. "It's the escapism of that drug," says Mr. Shindig, "because all the other drugs, you engage more with the world, you engage more with the person sat next to you. Ketamine is, 'I'll sit here in my own fucking bubble, and I don't even know what the world is.' Over the last ten years, it has gone through the roof as the world's gone through the floor."

When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the UK, the free party scene responded on its own terms. Ahead of the nationwide lockdown in March, the frequency of and numbers at events were down. Whereas a party in Salisbury might have expected 300 people, only 100 would show up. Communities of rig owners and associated scene elders in different parts of the country made it clear anyone throwing parties would be ostracized. For nearly four months the vast majority of sound systems fell silent, while the media labeled random gatherings of frustrated teenagers as 'illegal raves.'

One of the first major parties to happen in the Southwest took place between Bristol and Bath on July 18. Dubbed 'Return to Scumerset,' it made national news as an estimated 3,000 people descended on a disused airfield and partied from Saturday night through Sunday afternoon.

"When the lockdown started, the free parties stopped," says Mr. Shindig. "All the sound systems said, 'Okay we have to work as one with the whole community, as we're all in the same shit together.'

"[At the Scumerset rave] people were quite emotional to be back. The way everything has happened in the world has changed people's perspectives. It made a lot of people think, 'This is the sort of thing that used to give my life a lot of meaning, used to fill my life with a lot of energy and people and wholesomeness.'"

Just over a month later, an even larger party took place on the Southwest side of the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales. While everyone readily acknowledges the questionable safety aspects around social distancing at a rave in the midst of a pandemic, they're also quick to offset that argument against the government-sanctioned drinking taking place in pubs up and down the country seven nights a week since some lockdown restrictions were eased at the start of July. The phone lines for the rave reminded people with symptoms to stay away-even in the perceivably 'lawless' free party community, a sense of responsibility about the pandemic prevails. As with so many aspects of life affected by the virus, the risks around attending raves are balanced against the perceived benefits this self-reliant community brings to people.

"Parties coming back has given a lot of people hope," says Annabelle. "For a lot of people, their mental health during lockdown has been absolutely ruined, and this has been a really nice escape.

"It's not just partying. From being involved in the party scene, I've started my own business, Smoke My Tea, selling custom-designed vinyls and furniture. A lot of the sound systems have posted my work on their page, and a lot of people from the scene have bought my stuff and supported me. I used to work a horrible minimum-wage job, standing on my feet for nine hours a day, and it was mind-numbing. Because of all the links I've made through parties, I've made enough money to be self-sufficient, and the work I've built up helped me get an illustration degree at uni."

The modern fixation on competition and individualism is a pervasive aspect of the world we live in; but for young people, the communitarian spirit of the free party scene has been a source of nurture, support, and solidarity. The early 20-somethings I spoke to consider themselves older in the spectrum of free partygoers, thinking ahead and gathering emotional and practical tools and connections to help them navigate the wider world as they grow. Harry says the path for his sound system is a transition toward a legitimate business, something he and other fellow rig owners consider a rite of passage as they grow weary of the cat-and-mouse antics of free parties. Emily only goes to larger, multi-rig parties like the one in Wales now, but she relies on her nationwide network of friends gathered dancing in front of the stacks. Even if this wave of dancers and dreamers eventually move on to other callings in life, in the present moment the scene's operation outside authoritarian jurisdiction puts a unique responsibility on its shoulders. As the UK continues to grapple with the pandemic, the government seems prepared to leave millions in the nightlife industry unemployed in what feels like an ideological move rather than an economical one.

"I'm not sure what's gonna happen right now," says Mr. Shindig as we face down a bleak autumn and winter, "but it's not like when this is all over people are just gonna forget the raves exist. I don't even know what's gonna be left of the events industry by the time all this is finished, and raves are still gonna be there. Raves aren't going anywhere."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Saved by the rave: British youth are reclaiming public land to party, even during a pandemic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fed up with government hypocrisy, young people are escaping to the countryside in pursuit of freedom and release. Photographer Laurence Ellis documents the outdoor parties where communitarian spirit rages on "Waiting until midnight to find out where it's going to be. Getting in the car and trundling off to wherever the fuck you're going.

# data[].attributes.body
https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/937/1/OGradythesis.pdf

https://www.bidolito.co.uk/feature-the-changing-space-of-rave-culture/

# data[].attributes.body
Raves were essentially temporary communities that would crop up on the landscape, erect monuments (sound systems), worship them for a few days then move on.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Still from Mark Leckey's 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore'

The UK is on the verge of Brexit, in political deadlock, and public spending cuts continue to bite - things have definitely been better. Saying that, it was under a Thatcher government and in a similar climate of austerity, anxiety and tribulation that an important youth movement was spawned. A movement that would arguably be the last bonafide, original and liberated subculture of our time.

30 years after the second Summer ofLove, rave culture's influence still looms large in music, fashion, art and culture. Artists like Jeremy Deller create historical documentaries of the rave scene with - using rare and unseen archive footage, showing abandoned warehouse raves and the chaotic release of the dance floor - while fashion groups like Wavey Garms dress London's youth in impeccably researched, vintage rave attire.

Rave culture has reached full throwback status, even to the point of having '90s rave' novelty nights at Ministry of Sound. Clubs are filled with bucket hats, whistles and over-sized trainers, while kids who weren't born the first time round dance to acid house and hardcore like some kind of pilled-up historical reenactment; with the same obsessive attention to detail.

Misty eyed nostalgia and the inevitable repetitive cycle of fashion can account for part of the current facsimile of rave, but why is it still so present in contemporary art?

From artist Mark Leckey filling gallery spaces with overpowering, monolithic sound systems and films that depict the early rave scene - like Fiorucci made me Hardcoreand the semi-autobiographical Dream English Kid - to Jeremy Deller's fetishisation of acid house smiley faces and fascination with the style of the time, to younger artists like Eddie Peake installing London pirate radio giants Kool FM to broadcast from White Cube Bermondsey during his exhibition Concrete Pitch, it seems rave and what it went on to create is ever present in the minds of some of the biggest names in contemporary art.

It's even had an impact across the pond with artist Corey Arcangel producing tongue in cheek, transatlantic takes on rave with his pieces 414-3-RAVE-95 - which he says "revisits the 'rave' dance party phenomenon of the early to mid-1990s" - and Cat Rave.

Whether it's the freedom of the subculture that is so sorely lacking in contemporary movements of its kind, boring old nostalgia or a fascination with something excitingly alien - rave's' influence is one that still manifests in myriad forms in art and culture.

The introduction of ecstasy to the UK party scene in the mid-1980s and the influence of Chicago House music created a wave of underground parties that were like nothing Britain had seen before.

The UK adopted music from the US, imported drugs from Europe and created pockets of hedonistic ravers whose main concerns were good music and a good time. Fashion became colourful and baggy, decorated with smiley faces and Om symbols. Rave flyers depicted utopian worlds filled with cyborgs and fractal landscapes, using Daliesque surrealism to create a sort of neo-psychedelia. The young people of Britain were creating one of the most original scenes and aesthetics since punk, and like punk it would alarm the establishment, cause moral panic and leave its mark in the minds of creatives. While the fledgling scene had started with a handful of cliquey space cadets tripping on acid, rave really came into its own when ecstasy took hold.

Although two of the main components (music and drugs) were essentially foreign imports, rave culture progressed into something quintessentially British, stylistically and sonically. The music began to shift from acid house into harder genres like hardcore and later jungle and ravers became increasingly discerning with their tastes. They were no longer taking LSD at small exclusive parties, they were scoffing e's in huge outdoor arenas of rave; where all were welcome.

The parties started in the UK's clubs and warehouses, but as the influx and reputation of ecstasy grew so did the party scene. By the late 1980s huge outdoor raves were cropping up on plots of land across the British countryside. The parties were clandestinely promoted on a word-of-mouth basis using a network of phone numbers that would be called at particular times to find out the locations of the parties. Mark Leckey remembers: "I was down in Brighton and it was 'cool' and a bit snobby and elitist and all the rest of it, but then when you got to the hardcore rave scene it completely changed and all the people that you wouldn't have expected or maybe excluded would look at you as a freaky acid head and everybody was now necking loads of e's. It's glib to say that it was just down to drugs but the pull of ecstasy was a big part of it."

Journalist and author Matthew Collin agrees with this analysis of the movement."There is a constant friction between two competing ideologies within any culture: the elitist versus the populist, the avant-garde against the mass," he says in his book Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. "Although each of its phases was marked by such conflicts, Ecstasy culture's prevailing ethos was inclusive." Ecstasy had been the driving force behind this new youth movement and became the glue that was holding it all together. The sudden popularity of an illegal drug and the temporary communities of party goers gathering around it seemed to intimidate the establishment. The press didn't know what to make of it, oscillating between moral panic and taking a jovial interest."There would be outrage one week then next week it was like, 'Buy your smiley rave t shirt'," Leckey explains. "It always felt very manufactured."

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was introduced in 1994 by the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard. With its ridiculous stipulations targeting "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" and the subsequent crack-down on raves, it was instrumental in driving the free party scene much deeper underground with only the real hardcore willing to take the risks involved in holding such events. The press fed into this hostile environment with headlines exclaiming: "ACID HOUSE SEX DRUGS AND MUSIC CULT THREAT TO OUR CHILDREN." and "£12 TRIP TO AN EVIL NIGHT OF ECSTASY - Drugs Peril Of The Acid House Craze." There was a feeling that there had been a resounding victory for the right wing government and press, who had put an end to a youth movement that may have been the last of its kind.

The only thing that seemed to remain of rave after the bill was passed was the music, which was rapidly being thrust in to the mainstream. Groups like The Prodigy and Altern 8 were performing on Top Of The Pops while kids up and down the country were drawing smiley faces on their pencil cases.

Music and art have always gone hand in hand, with arguably some of the most interesting contemporary art existing somewhere between the two. Artists such as Mark Leckey, Dinos Chapman, Jeremy Deller and Martin Creed have either integrated music into their work or pursued separate musical projects and endeavours. This love of music could be what makes rave so appealing to contemporary artists.

Leckey tells me: "I never doubt music partly because of its universalism. If you ever do meet someone who doesn't listen to music that would be very odd and unusual, so it's something that touches everybody." Universalism and inclusivity is something that's often lacking in contemporary art, but is the ethos the rave scene was built on. The inclusive nature of music and its ability to instantly relay a message has a satisfaction to it that the painstaking, analytical interpretation and untangling of structures and discourses of art doesn't.

" Music works in a different realm to art," Leckey continues. "What I like about music is that it's rhythmic, melodic and all the rest of it but within that you can incorporate storytelling, politics, angst in the way that art can never quite do. Art - especially with politics - it's very difficult to sublimate it in a way that music does. Music has some kind of innate politics to it I think because of who it's made by. Art is essentially middle class, and when I talk about universalism I'm talking about class, really. Art is still elite, even though that word seems quite dead - it's still a bourgeois pursuit in a lot of ways. Music for me is a way of countering that." Could the injection of rave into art be an attempt to satisfyingly simplify it, whilst shunning the bourgeois exclusivity of the art world?

It was the inclusive nature of music that made rave so unifying. As a subculture it seemed to transcend race, class and sexuality. Even though drugs heavily factored into the equation the heartbeat of rave was music. Music - in particular acid house and later hardcore - was given a sort of celestial devotion by ravers, who'd decided to opt out of normality in search of excitement and adventure. Britain was grey, drab and lifeless and desperately lacking in prospects for young people. In contrast, raves were explosions of sound, colour and diversity filled with unknown opportunities and unexpected encounters - they were a much needed departure from the dismal norm that had afflicted Britain. In the face of adversity ravers organised a way of escaping the depressing restraints of Thatcher-driven austerity and unemployment, creating their own communities based around a love of raving.

Artist Thomas Van Linge was born in 1989 in Holland - the same year of the second Summer of Love in the UK - and makes work influenced by the iconography and ethos of that era. His 2018 exhibition Deep Down Inside (named after the house classic Deep Inside by Hardrive)at J.Hammond Projects was an exploration into the physical objects that make up raves as well as the negative press that the scene garnered in the late 80s. Sculptures made from turntable flight cases emblazoned with laser cut motifs were scattered around the space against a sinister backdrop of, a now iconic, anti ecstasy cartoon from The Sun newspaper in 1988. The cartoon is recreated on laser cut sheets of metal and depicts a cloaked Devil offering pills to unsuspecting youths, whilst hidden behind a smiley face.

Install shot of 'Deep Inside' at J.Hammond Projects

"I think rave culture in a sense was maybe one of the last collective subcultures or youth movements that was very much tied to - on one hand an industrialised landscape - and on the other hand this feeling of purposelessness," he tells me. "Whereas now we're entering into a different age, but I think that was one of the last big collective. youth movements, which collectively responded to its environment. I'm not sure if we have had something of a similar scale or similar power since then.

" Maybe the Summer of Love has been, but it's not like the music and the scene itself from that point onwards hasn't evolved in to a completely new thing."

As well as making art Van Linge produces dance music heavily influenced by early acid house and runs two electronic music record labels, Bakk Records and Rubber, through which he also throws regular parties - an echo of the most vital element of rave, people coming together to dance. Van Linge's relationships with art and music are equally intense, with one not being able to emerge without the other. "I cannot exist without doing both," he explains. "So if I only make art I basically want to kill myself - not in a literal sense, but I have this thing inside me that I am trying to get to or get out - that's just a part of making things. One part is making artworks: sculptures, videos etc, which is very much a planned way of working for me. I think ahead, I work with with other companies to realise certain productions, I have to gather funds, I have to make decisions which rely on a lot of money so everything is very planned. There's room for spontaneity, but everything is decided whereas when I make music or when I release music on the label or when I DJ it's very much in the moment and that is the thing that isn't really touched when I make art.

" For me I have to experience both."

Video from Bakk records Instagram

If music were the only element that made rave culture so appealing, as a means of relaying messages in art, then surely it wouldn't have endured to this extent and in so many prominent artists work. Nostalgia could factor into the equation and there is a definitely an element of that in fashion and music, but let's face it, the function of nostalgia is pretty uninteresting and not particularly powerful. For the appeal of rave to have stuck it out in this way there must be something else. Matthew Wilkinson is a British artist based in LA who thinks there is more to it than music, drugs and dumb nostalgia. He tells me: "I think the symbolism and iconography of rave in art is a great simple example of freedom. It's was one of the last cultural movements before everything started eating itself and falling in on itself and becoming a postmodern rehash of something else." Being based in the U.S. Wilkinson sees first hand how far the influence of the British rave scene has stretched but how it has been contorted on its journey: "Sound system culture in general is a different thing here. They look at these [speaker cabinets] and they go 'oh yeah that reminds me of Miami bass car culture'. Obviously there's Chicago house music and Detroit techno, but American dance music now - let's face it - is not the best and they call it EDM. They got into the whole rave thing a lot later here and it became something quite ugly."

It seems that rave doesn't travel well, but from what Van Linge tells me it is something that is an unavoidable presence as a settler in the UK: "As soon as I moved to the UK I was of course very much in touch with the Dutch history of rave and gabba. I threw a lot of techno parties in the years before that so I was very much in touch with that specific aesthetic and history. Then when I moved here it was only natural for me to investigate that further than what I had seen on MTV as kid. I think also because I've always been interested in the relationship between the developments of youth subcultures and the technology and industry that developed with it or at least at the same time. Looking into the technological and industrial history of London and the buildings and the materials that were attached to it I immediately also encountered the rave aesthetic - it's hard to miss almost."

This also raises the question of authenticity. Jeremy Deller and Mark Leckey have both made art heavily influenced by the rave and free party scene, but have approached it from very different angles. Leckey's work draws from experience producing a semi autobiographical narrative using films and objects while Deller approaches it as a historian - documenting rave with films and performances and taking less of an experiential angle. Both artists are of a similar age and whether they navigated the M25 as kids trying to find parties or not they both lived through the era. Deller is vocal about the fact he was never at these raves, telling Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the Financial Times that: "At the time I was really interested in it but weirdly I didn't know how to get to them [raves]. So I missed out."

Should there be a level of authenticity or experience when documenting cultures of this kind? "There's this whole idea of 'back in the day you weren't there' but I don't think that matters at all," Wilkinson explains. "There's enough documentation around it and enough people that one can still go an talk to. I mean there's great old footage on Youtube of parties so it's all there and tangible. I don't think you have to had been there to authenticate your gestures."

When I asked Deller his reasons for documenting and teaching the history of rave he said he wanted to show "the wider picture". Last month I visited Deller's Wiltshire Before Christ at 180 The Strand - a collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, photographer David Simms and uber-cool streetwear brand Aries. The show continues Deller's fascination with Stonehenge and fuses it with rave iconography. Visitors were greeted by large spinning cut-outs of the National Trust logo and beaming acid house smiley faces painted on to straw archery targets. Large photos of eerie figures, hanging out in neolithic sites, dressed in hoodies and pagan robes decorated with slogans like "Make Archaeology Sexy Again" hang next to posters from the Stonehenge Festival, that used to take place on the Summer Solstice.

The exhibition and products, made by Aries, explored the ritualistic aspects of the neolithic period and the parallels they have with free parties. When asked what the link between rave culture and neolithic mysticism Deller told me: "What links them is ritual, abandonment, intoxication and the countryside." Deller isn't the only artist to make this link between rave, folklore, magic and mysticism. There is something about raves and their use of the British countryside that connects the ceremonial behaviour of druids and pagans and the structures they built. Wilkinson tells me: "It's really ritualistic - when you think about stone circles and solstice - Making these constructions [sound systems] to be almost worshipped. The big raves always happen on May Day or the solstice - they used to do the festival next to Stone Henge. It taps into our relationship with the land that people turn against nowadays or have done since the 18th century. It is that undeniable link and I think that's why - going back to America's relationship to rave culture they don't necessarily touch that side of it."

Raves were essentially temporary communities that would crop up on the landscape, erect monuments (sound systems), worship them for a few days then move on. These objects of technology often had a magical affinity. Leckey has often talked about the connection between magic and technology and tells me: "The more technology advances us into the future the more it paradoxically boomerangs us into the past where we start to think with this animistic mindset where everything's alive. In an aboriginal sense of like rocks and trees and animals talking to us - technology is actually producing the same affect where everything that surrounds us is able to communicate with us in some form or other.

"It comes from trying to grasp technology. The more pervasive, the more ubiquitous technology becomes the more, to me, it feels more magical - not in a good way necessarily, but it allows me to do all these things that once seemed impossible."

The objects that make up a rave - sound systems, flight cases, turntables, pills - are often fetishised in art or seen to be just as compelling as art itself. Wilkinson explains: "There's something incredible about big sound systems - just the engineering of it. These big bass bins only came into being in the late 20th century so they're emblematic of our time. They're these big monoliths and the physicality of standing next to these things is fascinating. The sound systems and cases etc is what you bring - it's the only constant in the environment and the scenery is a quarry or an old factory or disused air field from WWII."

Leckey informs me about his famous sound system sculptures saying: "I don't show them anymore to be honest. It's complicated but at the time - when I was showing sound systems and Fiorucci - I had an axe to grind with the art world, which was to say these things come from a culture that I came from and I think they are just as valid as anything that you've got in your museum. A sound system is as sophisticated and as aesthetically pleasing as any sculpture."

Turning these objects into art can arguably change the meaning they have attached them which isn't necessarily a positive thing. "Sound systems for me came from raves and it feels like they don't belong to me anymore," Leckey explains. "I still have that axe to grind, but I think that's perhaps going about it the wrong way. Basically you're this scout that's going out and acting as this go-between and you're bringing things from a culture that most people in museums don't know about and you're going, 'Look at this' and they go 'Oh that's exciting' and they introduce it to the galleries and then it gets sold, which is problematic as well. In the end it just makes me quite uncomfortable."

Contemporary art, like most creative industries, is sadly governed by money. When something like a subculture is absorbed by the commercial side of art and somehow tamed or cut up into easily digested pieces, made palatable for a particular audience, there is a something disheartening about it. Should movements like rave culture be kept solely for those who dared to experience them and a million miles away from contemporary art, or is documenting them in this way as important as documenting any part of history? Whatever the answer may be, rave culture's impact as one of the most important and original subcultures of our time is undeniable and its influence doesn't show any signs of diminishing. "It was a futuristic movement - a movement of futuristic music, of doing new things, new drugs - a new kind of love," Van Linge tells me. "I'm not sure whether the same group of people could go through that again - maybe if you talk about different cultures - maybe from a typical Eurocentric perspective, but maybe not. The world is a lot bigger."

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The Art of Rave: why contemporary art loves rave

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The UK is on the verge of Brexit, in political deadlock, and public spending cuts continue to bite - things have definitely been better. Saying that, it was under a Thatcher government and in a similar climate of austerity, anxiety and tribulation that an important youth movement was spawned.

# data[].attributes.body
“I never doubt music partly because of its universalism. If you ever do meet someone who doesn’t listen to music that would be very odd and unusual, so it’s something that touches everybody.” Universalism and inclusivity is something that’s often lacking in contemporary art, but is the ethos the rave scene was built on. The inclusive nature of music and its ability to instantly relay a message has a satisfaction to it that the painstaking, analytical interpretation and untangling of structures and discourses of art doesn’t.

“Music works in a different realm to art,” Leckey continues. “What I like about music is that it’s rhythmic, melodic and all the rest of it but within that you can incorporate storytelling, politics, angst in the way that art can never quite do.

Art – especially with politics – it’s very difficult to sublimate it in a way that music does. Music has some kind of innate politics to it I think because of who it’s made by. Art is essentially middle class, and when I talk about universalism I’m talking about class, really. Art is still elite, even though that word seems quite dead? – ?it’s still a bourgeois pursuit in a lot of ways. Music for me is a way of countering that.” Could the injection of rave into art be an attempt to satisfyingly simplify it, whilst shunning the bourgeois exclusivity of the art world?

It was the inclusive nature of music that made rave so unifying. As a subculture it seemed to transcend race, class and sexuality. Even though drugs heavily factored into the equation the heartbeat of rave was music.

Music – in particular acid house and later hardcore – was given a sort of celestial devotion by ravers, who’d decided to opt out of normality in search of excitement and adventure. Britain was grey, drab and lifeless and desperately lacking in prospects for young people.

In contrast, raves were explosions of sound, colour and diversity filled with unknown opportunities and unexpected encounters? – ?they were a much needed departure from the dismal norm that had afflicted Britain. In the face of adversity ravers organised a way of escaping the depressing restraints of Thatcher-driven austerity and unemployment, creating their own communities based around a love of raving.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The UK is on the verge of Brexit, in political deadlock, and public spending cuts continue to bite - things have definitely been better. Saying that, it was under a Thatcher government and in a similar climate of austerity, anxiety and tribulation that an important youth movement was spawned. A movement that would arguably be the last bonafide, original and liberated subculture of our time.

30 years after the second Summer of Love, rave culture's influence still looms large in music, fashion, art and culture. Artists like Jeremy Deller create historical documentaries of the rave scene with Everybody In The Place - using rare and unseen archive footage, showing abandoned warehouse raves and the chaotic release of the dance floor - while fashion groups like Wavey Garms dress London's youth in impeccably researched, vintage rave attire.

Rave culture has reached full throwback status, even to the point of having '90s rave' novelty nights at Ministry of Sound. Clubs are filled with bucket hats, whistles and over-sized trainers, while kids who weren't born the first time round dance to acid house and hardcore like some kind of pilled-up historical reenactment; with the same obsessive attention to detail.

Misty eyed nostalgia and the inevitable repetitive cycle of fashion can account for part of the current facsimile of rave, but why is it still so present in contemporary art?

From artist Mark Leckey filling gallery spaces with overpowering, monolithic sound systems and films that depict the early rave scene - like Fiorucci made me Hardcoreand the semi-autobiographical Dream English Kid - to Jeremy Deller's fetishisation of acid house smiley faces and fascination with the style of the time, to younger artists like Eddie Peake installing London pirate radio giants Kool FM to broadcast from White Cube Bermondsey during his exhibition Concrete Pitch, it seems rave and what it went on to create is ever present in the minds of some of the biggest names in contemporary art.

It's even had an impact across the pond with artist Corey Arcangel producing tongue in cheek, transatlantic takes on rave with his pieces 414-3-RAVE-95 - which he says "revisits the 'rave' dance party phenomenon of the early to mid-1990s" - and Cat Rave.

Whether it's the freedom of the subculture that is so sorely lacking in contemporary movements of its kind, boring old nostalgia or a fascination with something excitingly alien - rave's' influence is one that still manifests in myriad forms in art and culture.

The introduction of ecstasy to the UK party scene in the mid-1980s and the influence of Chicago House music created a wave of underground parties that were like nothing Britain had seen before.

The UK adopted music from the US, imported drugs from Europe and created pockets of hedonistic ravers whose main concerns were good music and a good time. Fashion became colourful and baggy, decorated with smiley faces and Om symbols. Rave flyers depicted utopian worlds filled with cyborgs and fractal landscapes, using Daliesque surrealism to create a sort of neo-psychedelia. The young people of Britain were creating one of the most original scenes and aesthetics since punk, and like punk it would alarm the establishment, cause moral panic and leave its mark in the minds of creatives. While the fledgling scene had started with a handful of cliquey space cadets tripping on acid, rave really came into its own when ecstasy took hold.

Although two of the main components (music and drugs) were essentially foreign imports, rave culture progressed into something quintessentially British, stylistically and sonically. The music began to shift from acid house into harder genres like hardcore and later jungle and ravers became increasingly discerning with their tastes. They were no longer taking LSD at small exclusive parties, they were scoffing e's in huge outdoor arenas of rave; where all were welcome.

The parties started in the UK's clubs and warehouses, but as the influx and reputation of ecstasy grew so did the party scene. By the late 1980s huge outdoor raves were cropping up on plots of land across the British countryside. The parties were clandestinely promoted on a word-of-mouth basis using a network of phone numbers that would be called at particular times to find out the locations of the parties. Mark Leckey remembers: "I was down in Brighton and it was 'cool' and a bit snobby and elitist and all the rest of it, but then when you got to the hardcore rave scene it completely changed and all the people that you wouldn't have expected or maybe excluded would look at you as a freaky acid head and everybody was now necking loads of e's. It's glib to say that it was just down to drugs but the pull of ecstasy was a big part of it."

Journalist and author Matthew Collin agrees with this analysis of the movement."There is a constant friction between two competing ideologies within any culture: the elitist versus the populist, the avant-garde against the mass," he says in his book Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. "Although each of its phases was marked by such conflicts, Ecstasy culture's prevailing ethos was inclusive." Ecstasy had been the driving force behind this new youth movement and became the glue that was holding it all together. The sudden popularity of an illegal drug and the temporary communities of party goers gathering around it seemed to intimidate the establishment. The press didn't know what to make of it, oscillating between moral panic and taking a jovial interest."There would be outrage one week then next week it was like, 'Buy your smiley rave t shirt'," Leckey explains. "It always felt very manufactured."

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was introduced in 1994 by the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard. With its ridiculous stipulations targeting "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" and the subsequent crack-down on raves, it was instrumental in driving the free party scene much deeper underground with only the real hardcore willing to take the risks involved in holding such events. The press fed into this hostile environment with headlines exclaiming: "ACID HOUSE SEX DRUGS AND MUSIC CULT THREAT TO OUR CHILDREN." and "£12 TRIP TO AN EVIL NIGHT OF ECSTASY - Drugs Peril Of The Acid House Craze." There was a feeling that there had been a resounding victory for the right wing government and press, who had put an end to a youth movement that may have been the last of its kind.

The only thing that seemed to remain of rave after the bill was passed was the music, which was rapidly being thrust in to the mainstream. Groups like The Prodigy and Altern 8 were performing on Top Of The Pops while kids up and down the country were drawing smiley faces on their pencil cases.

Music and art have always gone hand in hand, with arguably some of the most interesting contemporary art existing somewhere between the two. Artists such as Mark Leckey, Dinos Chapman, Jeremy Deller and Martin Creed have either integrated music into their work or pursued separate musical projects and endeavours. This love of music could be what makes rave so appealing to contemporary artists.

Leckey tells me: "I never doubt music partly because of its universalism. If you ever do meet someone who doesn't listen to music that would be very odd and unusual, so it's something that touches everybody." Universalism and inclusivity is something that's often lacking in contemporary art, but is the ethos the rave scene was built on. The inclusive nature of music and its ability to instantly relay a message has a satisfaction to it that the painstaking, analytical interpretation and untangling of structures and discourses of art doesn't.

" Music works in a different realm to art," Leckey continues. "What I like about music is that it's rhythmic, melodic and all the rest of it but within that you can incorporate storytelling, politics, angst in the way that art can never quite do. Art - especially with politics - it's very difficult to sublimate it in a way that music does. Music has some kind of innate politics to it I think because of who it's made by. Art is essentially middle class, and when I talk about universalism I'm talking about class, really. Art is still elite, even though that word seems quite dead? - ?it's still a bourgeois pursuit in a lot of ways. Music for me is a way of countering that." Could the injection of rave into art be an attempt to satisfyingly simplify it, whilst shunning the bourgeois exclusivity of the art world?

It was the inclusive nature of music that made rave so unifying. As a subculture it seemed to transcend race, class and sexuality. Even though drugs heavily factored into the equation the heartbeat of rave was music. Music - in particular acid house and later hardcore - was given a sort of celestial devotion by ravers, who'd decided to opt out of normality in search of excitement and adventure. Britain was grey, drab and lifeless and desperately lacking in prospects for young people. In contrast, raves were explosions of sound, colour and diversity filled with unknown opportunities and unexpected encounters? - ?they were a much needed departure from the dismal norm that had afflicted Britain. In the face of adversity ravers organised a way of escaping the depressing restraints of Thatcher-driven austerity and unemployment, creating their own communities based around a love of raving.

Artist Thomas Van Linge was born in 1989 in Holland - the same year of the second Summer of Love in the UK - and makes work influenced by the iconography and ethos of that era. His 2018 exhibition Deep Down Inside (named after the house classic Deep Inside by Hardrive)at J.Hammond Projects was an exploration into the physical objects that make up raves as well as the negative press that the scene garnered in the late 80s. Sculptures made from turntable flight cases emblazoned with laser cut motifs were scattered around the space against a sinister backdrop of, a now iconic, anti ecstasy cartoon from The Sun newspaper in 1988. The cartoon is recreated on laser cut sheets of metal and depicts a cloaked Devil offering pills to unsuspecting youths, whilst hidden behind a smiley face.

"I think rave culture in a sense was maybe one of the last collective subcultures or youth movements that was very much tied to - on one hand an industrialised landscape - and on the other hand this feeling of purposelessness," he tells me. "Whereas now we're entering into a different age, but I think that was one of the last big collective. youth movements, which collectively responded to its environment. I'm not sure if we have had something of a similar scale or similar power since then.

" Maybe the Summer of Love has been, but it's not like the music and the scene itself from that point onwards hasn't evolved in to a completely new thing."

As well as making art Van Linge produces dance music heavily influenced by early acid house and runs two electronic music record labels, through which he also throws regular parties - an echo of the most vital element of rave, people coming together to dance. Van Linge's relationships with art and music are equally intense, with one not being able to emerge without the other. "I cannot exist without doing both," he explains. "So if I only make art I basically want to kill myself - not in a literal sense, but I have this thing inside me that I am trying to get to or get out? - that's just a part of making things. One part is making artworks: sculptures, videos etc, which is very much a planned way of working for me. I think ahead, I work with with other companies to realise certain productions, I have to gather funds, I have to make decisions which rely on a lot of money so everything is very planned. There's room for spontaneity, but everything is decided whereas when I make music or when I release music on the label or when I DJ it's very much in the moment and that is the thing that isn't really touched when I make art.

" For me I have to experience both."

If music were the only element that made rave culture so appealing, as a means of relaying messages in art, then surely it wouldn't have endured to this extent and in so many prominent artists work. Nostalgia could factor into the equation and there is a definitely an element of that in fashion and music, but let's face it, the function of nostalgia is pretty uninteresting and not particularly powerful. For the appeal of rave to have stuck it out in this way there must be something else. Matthew Wilkinson is a British artist based in LA who thinks there is more to it than music, drugs and dumb nostalgia. He tells me: "I think the symbolism and iconography of rave in art is a great simple example of freedom. It's was one of the last cultural movements before everything started eating itself and falling in on itself and becoming a postmodern rehash of something else." Being based in the U.S. Wilkinson sees first hand how far the influence of the British rave scene has stretched but how it has been contorted on its journey: "Sound system culture in general is a different thing here. They look at these [speaker cabinets] and they go 'oh yeah that reminds me of Miami bass car culture'. Obviously there's Chicago house music and Detroit techno, but American dance music now - let's face it - is not the best and they call it EDM. They got into the whole rave thing a lot later here and it became something quite ugly."

It seems that rave doesn't travel well, but from what Van Linge tells me it is something that is an unavoidable presence as a settler in the UK: "As soon as I moved to the UK I was of course very much in touch with the Dutch history of rave and gabba. I threw a lot of techno parties in the years before that so I was very much in touch with that specific aesthetic and history. Then when I moved here it was only natural for me to investigate that further than what I had seen on MTV as kid. I think also because I've always been interested in the relationship between the developments of youth subcultures and the technology and industry that developed with it or at least at the same time. Looking into the technological and industrial history of London and the buildings and the materials that were attached to it I immediately also encountered the rave aesthetic - it's hard to miss almost."

This also raises the question of authenticity. Jeremy Deller and Mark Leckey have both made art heavily influenced by the rave and free party scene, but have approached it from very different angles. Leckey's work draws from experience producing a semi autobiographical narrative using films and objects while Deller approaches it as a historian - documenting rave with films and performances and taking less of an experiential angle. Both artists are of a similar age and whether they navigated the M25 as kids trying to find parties or not they both lived through the era. Deller is vocal about the fact he was never at these raves, telling Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the Financial Times that: "At the time I was really interested in it but weirdly I didn't know how to get to them [raves]. So I missed out."

Should there be a level of authenticity or experience when documenting cultures of this kind? "There's this whole idea of 'back in the day you weren't there' but I don't think that matters at all," Wilkinson explains. "There's enough documentation around it and enough people that one can still go an talk to. I mean there's great old footage on Youtube of parties so it's all there and tangible. I don't think you have to had been there to authenticate your gestures."

When I asked Deller his reasons for documenting and teaching the history of rave he said he wanted to show "the wider picture". Last month I visited Deller's Wiltshire Before Christ at 180 The Strand- a collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, photographer David Simms and uber-cool streetwear brand Aries. The show continues Deller's fascination with Stonehenge and fuses it with rave iconography. Visitors were greeted by large spinning cut-outs of the National Trust logo and beaming acid house smiley faces painted on to straw archery targets. Large photos of eerie figures, hanging out in neolithic sites, dressed in hoodies and pagan robes decorated with slogans like "Make Archaeology Sexy Again" hang next to posters from the Stonehenge Festival, that used to take place on the Summer Solstice.

The exhibition and products, made by Aries, explored the ritualistic aspects of the neolithic period and the parallels they have with free parties. When asked what the link between rave culture and neolithic mysticism Deller told me: "What links them is ritual, abandonment, intoxication and the countryside." Deller isn't the only artist to make this link between rave, folklore, magic and mysticism. There is something about raves and their use of the British countryside that connects the ceremonial behaviour of druids and pagans and the structures they built. Wilkinson tells me: "It's really ritualistic? - when you think about stone circles and solstice - Making these constructions [sound systems] to be almost worshipped. The big raves always happen on May Day or the solstice - they used to do the festival next to Stone Henge. It taps into our relationship with the land that people turn against nowadays or have done since the 18th century. It is that undeniable link and I think that's why - going back to America's relationship to rave culture they don't necessarily touch that side of it."

Raves were essentially temporary communities that would crop up on the landscape, erect monuments (sound systems), worship them for a few days then move on. These objects of technology often had a magical affinity. Leckey has often talked about the connection between magic and technology and tells me: "The more technology advances us into the future the more it paradoxically boomerangs us into the past where we start to think with this animistic mindset where everything's alive. In an aboriginal sense of like rocks and trees and animals talking to us - technology is actually producing the same affect where everything that surrounds us is able to communicate with us in some form or other.

"It comes from trying to grasp technology. The more pervasive, the more ubiquitous technology becomes the more, to me, it feels more magical - not in a good way necessarily, but it allows me to do all these things that once seemed impossible."

The objects that make up a rave - sound systems, flight cases, turntables, pills - are often fetishised in art or seen to be just as compelling as art itself. Wilkinson explains: "There's something incredible about big sound systems - just the engineering of it. These big bass bins only came into being in the late 20th century so they're emblematic of our time. They're these big monoliths and the physicality of standing next to these things is fascinating. The sound systems and cases etc is what you bring - it's the only constant in the environment and the scenery is a quarry or an old factory or disused air field from WWII."

Leckey informs me about his famous sound system sculptures saying: "I don't show them anymore to be honest. It's complicated but at the time - when I was showing sound systems and Fiorucci - I had an axe to grind with the art world, which was to say these things come from a culture that I came from and I think they are just as valid as anything that you've got in your museum. A sound system is as sophisticated and as aesthetically pleasing as any sculpture."

Turning these objects into art can arguably change the meaning they have attached them which isn't necessarily a positive thing. "Sound systems for me came from raves and it feels like they don't belong to me anymore," Leckey explains. "I still have that axe to grind, but I think that's perhaps going about it the wrong way. Basically you're this scout that's going out and acting as this go-between and you're bringing things from a culture that most people in museums don't know about and you're going, 'Look at this' and they go 'Oh that's exciting' and they introduce it to the galleries and then it gets sold, which is problematic as well. In the end it just makes me quite uncomfortable."

Contemporary art, like most creative industries, is sadly governed by money. When something like a subculture is absorbed by the commercial side of art and somehow tamed or cut up into easily digested pieces, made palatable for a particular audience, there is a something disheartening about it. Should movements like rave culture be kept solely for those who dared to experience them and a million miles away from contemporary art, or is documenting them in this way as important as documenting any part of history? Whatever the answer may be, rave culture's impact as one of the most important and original subcultures of our time is undeniable and its influence doesn't show any signs of diminishing. "It was a futuristic movement - a movement of futuristic music, of doing new things, new drugs - a new kind of love," Van Linge tells me. "I'm not sure whether the same group of people could go through that again - maybe if you talk about different cultures - maybe from a typical Eurocentric perspective, but maybe not. The world is a lot bigger."

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Eric Thorp
Eric Thorp is a writer and curator based in London. @thorpstavri

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The Art of Rave: why contemporary art loves rave

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The UK is on the verge of Brexit, in political deadlock, and public spending cuts continue to bite - things have definitely been better. Saying that, it was under a Thatcher government and in a similar climate of austerity, anxiety and tribulation that an important youth movement was spawned.

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was introduced in 1994 by the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard. With its ridiculous stipulations targeting “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” and the subsequent crack-down on raves, it was instrumental in driving the free party scene much deeper underground with only the real hardcore willing to take the risks involved in holding such event

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https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/graphic-design/explore-graphic-design-behind-1990s-rave-culture/

Rave flyers depicted utopian worlds filled with cyborgs and fractal landscapes, using Daliesque surrealism to create a sort of neo-psychedelia.

https://fadmagazine.com/2019/04/16/the-art-of-rave-why-contemporary-art-loves-rave/

https://ifonlyuk.com/airbrushed-dreamscapes-rave-flyers-early-90s/

Matthew Wilkinson is a British artist based in LA who thinks there is more to it than music, drugs and dumb nostalgia. He tells me: “I think the symbolism and iconography of rave in art is a great simple example of freedom. It’s was one of the last cultural movements before everything started eating itself and falling in on itself and becoming a postmodern rehash of something else.”

The rave flyer: an integral invitation in acid house's heyday and a gateway to the magical parties in fields and warehouses across the UK.

https://www.redbull.com/ca-en/toronto-nightlife-design-and-rave-culture
Visuals and graphics are the first thing you see when you hear of the party and the last thing they remember as the sun slowly peaks through the doors of the party at 5am.

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Software News articles, brought to you from the experts at Tech Advisor, the trusted source for consumer tech info and advice.

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unsung design heroes from era of flier design

women behind the rave

dance- founders

end to rave - The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act

exploring the relationship between music and design

clubs as designed spaces : How club spaces are designed as environments for participatory/interactive performance and how are these spaces are created, navigated and utilised by those who inhabit them

dance as a form of revolution, freedom, enlightenment and to let go

links to spirituality

unbridled creativity that brought out the energetic feeling of rave.”

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https://www.bidolito.co.uk/feature-the-changing-space-of-rave-culture/

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The purpose of historic buildings in Liverpool has altered, with the most impressive of architectural forms being adopted and adapted for raves. Becca Frankland explores why...

Dance music events have made themselves at home in an abundance of spaces since the inception of the rave phenomenon - everything from the dark and dingy factory in Chicago championed by Frankie Knuckles at the birth of it all, to fields and gritty industrial sites off the M25 in the 80s as the UK turned to acid. They soon settled in fully licensed clubs and warehouses and resided in them comfortably.

But crowds are insatiable, their thirst for new and immersive experiences unquenchable, which has led promoters to source spectacular venues, rich with history. Opulent neoclassical halls, prodigious places of worship and eerie derelict mental asylums have all been seized for party purposes in order to cater to the varied needs of clubbers, predominantly within Liverpool.

There is something indisputably triumphant about housing events in these unique spaces. We have an abundance of opportunities, in theory, to create incredible parties within awe-inspiring venues, but in practice the leeway has not always been there to achieve it. In 1994, John Major's Criminal Justice Bill sought to outlaw outdoor dance festivals and "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". This was the fundamental reason the early rave scene transferred to properly licensed buildings. The parties filled with spontaneous spirits and allegedly disorderly punters were seen as a threat to the authorities, so their dynamics were forced to change.

These days, promoters are working closely with the local councils in order to create a safe environment for us to revel in, without it feeling restrained. Inside the historical venues that organisers inhabit, the opportunity for clubbers to lose themselves is heightened. Combine the music with listed or neglected architecture, and it has the power to substantially change our frame of mind for the duration of time spent there.

"These buildings become kind of a sanctioned part of urban life, and a powerful part of it." Professor Robert Kronenburg, author of Live Architecture: Venues, Stages and Arenas for Popular Music

"Architecture does affect the way people think," says Professor Robert Kronenburg, the author of Live Architecture: Venues, Stages and Arenas for Popular Music. "With raves, it's a different sort of atmosphere: rather than it being about the act or the performance, it's more about the individuality of the person taking part."

These venues encourage the individuals to connect on a much deeper level, with their environment and with the buildings themselves. We live in a 21 st-century world where personal connection can be limited; we are surrounded by technology and lacklustre habitats, but these dance music events revolve around the energy generated and aesthetic emotional responses, which are characterised by feelings stimulated by artefacts such as architectural designs. This ability to manipulate emotions encourages us to prefer certain building styles over others, and we have manifested our interest in these breathtaking historical landmarks.

"It's something that is part of a new phenomenon which is about music, culture and arts merging together and thus being seen to be an appropriate activity to take place in public buildings," explained Professor Kronenburg. The music itself sits centrally in the overall experience when in attendance at these events, but so many club nights offer too much of the same; most line-ups have been done two times over, and the musical policies occasionally become stale and predictable. In order to keep audiences interested, the visual impact needs to be unforgettable and it needs to be attributed to a certain event in order for the promoter to develop a brand. "These buildings become kind of a sanctioned part of urban life, and a powerful part of it," adds Professor Kronenburg. "Cities look on live music events as ways of creating an identity for themselves."

In Liverpool it is the club night Freeze that has created an identity in relation to unique and powerful buildings, dominating the likes of St. Luke's Church (otherwise known as the Bombed Out Church), an abandoned asylum in Newsham Park and the Grade I-listed St. George's Hall.

Some of these venues, most notably the Bombed Out Church, reflect so much more than just the building's infrastructure: they are a symbol of how the city has stood against adversity and has succeeded in maintaining its authentic beauty. "The lack of a roof at the Bombed Out Church creates a special sort of vibe, irrespective of the weather. Generally speaking there's a tangibility of friendliness at our events in this venue," explains Rob Casson, the owner of Freeze, "which is definitely down to the type of people we attract, but the space also enhances this - especially because there's an evangelical purpose behind the location."

"It's the same with the event at the [Anglican] Cathedral," Casson continues. "The atmosphere was very respectful, almost awestruck, which meant it never quite went 'off' the way clubs can. This wasn't a bad thing at all: if anything, it creates a really unique mood that you don't usually get at all-night dance music events."

The pious purpose of these venues echoes the religious connotations that have been related with dance music culture since the very beginning. Frankie Knuckles himself once claimed: "When those three thousand personalities become one personality, it's the most amazing thing. It's like that in church. By the time the preacher gets everything going, or that choir gets everything going, at one particular point, when things start peaking, that whole room becomes one."

Frankie Knuckles' Warehouse club was seen as a sanctuary for the so-called undesirables, a place were black and gay men, who struggled to find a place to belong, could come and lose their inhibitions. It provided salvation and a home for all races and sexualities; the common ground was music. House music itself had origins with traditions like gospel. Spiritually and aesthetically, it developed from the need of the oppressed in the US as they built a community through dance, and it was shortly followed by those frustrated by Thatcher's England and their alternative society: acid house.

"These venues have incredible heritage and the interest that surrounds them develops from this idea that these buildings were never built for these events." Rob Casson, Freeze

Inside a building structured for a religious routine like the Bombed Out Church, it is near impossible not to compare the chapel experience with the rave experience. As the crowds pour into these events, there is adulation of the DJ who takes the role of a leader, who directs the thoughts of those in their company. And those moments, when various minds come together and the crowd vocally show their appreciation of the music and the environment in unity and chant, mirror the prayers repeated in a church.

For some movers and shakers, coming together in these environments for dance music events is still as significant as a religion; it is a chance to join with people who have a similar outlook on life, it is a spiritual experience, a melting pot of freedom and compassion; but the notion of trespassing, mischievousness and rebellion against modern society is still palpable.

"I think what we do as an event has an impact on crowds because it's so different from anything else they can experience elsewhere when it comes to clubbing," says Casson. "These venues have incredible heritage and the interest that surrounds them develops from this idea that these buildings were never built for these events."

Despite the overwhelming success of the events that take place in these historic buildings, it does not come without hurdles for promoters. The confines of a normal club space have been designed wholly for music events, with almost everything in place prior to the event, but when ideas are put in motion to reinvent architecture, it takes extensive planning and can often be met with adversity.

The Bombed Out Church is set to be repaired in the autumn, with £150,000-worth of repairs planned to make the landmark safer. A major consultation has taken place to consult on the future of the church, with the public able to decide on what sort of events should take place within the building. The council will now entertain expressions of interest, with the possibility of new occupiers taking it over next year, but what does this mean for Freeze?

Time will tell what happens to one of Liverpool's most awe-inspiring places to party, but the strength of the opinions concerning what will happen to the space has highlighted that our relationship with bricks and mortar stretches so much further than a roof (or lack of) over our heads.

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THE CHANGING SPACE OF RAVE CULTURE | Bido Lito! Magazine

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The purpose of historic buildings in Liverpool has altered, with the most impressive of architectural forms being adopted and adapted for raves. Becca Frankland explores why...

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Simon Reynolds

Mark Leckey

Jeremy Deller

The new rave:
https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/electronic-from-kraftwerk-to-the-chemical-brothers/the-new-rave

Thomas van Linge

https://www.ofluxo.net/deep-down-inside-by-thomas-van-linge-at-j-hammond-projects/

Rick Banks
https://www.typeroom.eu/article/clubbed-death-uk-s-ultimate-typographic-rave-bangers

Hansje van Halem
http://hansje.net

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The current Design Museum exhibition Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers tells stories of some of the rebels & mavericks who helped build the world of electronic music, but who are the creatives shaping today's scene and moving it forward?

Figures from some of London's favourite record labels, music groups and DJs, explore the exhibition and reflect on their relationship with electronic music, claiming museum spaces and life in lockdown.

The film has been created in collaboration with creative studio Play Nice.

'This story is about acknowledging the past & presenting the future of electronic music, through our cast who have been inspired by the countless black musicians in this space. Our cast, who are also inspirations in their own right shaping sonics & nightlife in London, are now undoubtedly going to shape a whole industry post-lockdown.' - Play Nice

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The current Design Museum exhibition Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers tells stories of some of the rebels & mavericks who helped build the world of electronic music, but who are the creatives shaping today's scene and moving it forward?

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The passage of time is mean; it is a malignant and unkind force. Faces fade into flickering figures, places become paler and sounds settle into silence. Like old photographs that become yellowed and frayed with time, our memories get stashed away in drawers, stowed deeper into the recesses of the mind.

In this collection of love stories from Singapore’s past, revisit history through family photographs, treasured keepsakes and personal memories about love. Each frame is an alchemy of the particles of time, space and mood in history. We only need to pause and look.

https://meantime.sg/issues

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MEANTIME: A Collection of Love Stories from Singapore's Past

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The passage of time is mean; it is a malignant and unkind force. Faces fade into flickering figures, places become paler and sounds settle into silence. Like old photographs that become yellowed and frayed with time, our memories get stashed away in drawers, stowed deeper into the recesses of the mind.

In this collection of love stories from Singapore’s past, revisit history through family photographs, treasured keepsakes and personal memories about love. Each frame is an alchemy of the particles of time, space and mood in history. We only need to pause and look.

These are our love stories – and our shared human experience.

SHOP: www.meantime.sg

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After watching THE GOOP LAB - episode 3, the idea of women feeling insecure in their bodies as they feel they dont meet the high social conventions of the perfect women, was bought to my attention.

There are unrealistic stereotypes and ‘honest’ images of the female body do not exist. The programme explored how men have taken images of women for centuries and as soon as the camera is given to the women, it becomes vein.

This highlights a key point from a wednesday lecture about women in design history. It taught me it is important for women to be in charge of their sensuality, body and opinions like men and not disassociate it from our bodies.

Women are meant to be perfect- we are told what to think, say, act, dress and look etc, and this is highlighted in the very inspiring video Be a Lady They Said by Girls Girls Girls Magazine.

I want to depict the reality of the female body which I am experiencing for than ever in isolation, being at one with my natural self. I want to use the skills I learnt during the project to portray intense intimacy, honest, personal liberation and the beauty of imperfection of the woman form through style of photography as well as the narrative.

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Paul explained that intergrated layout and structures and dynamic photography by Richard Avidon for example observed and reflected the acceleration of modern life and the changing of ideas towards women.

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- Dealing with failure/ uncertainty
- Body image
- Obsession with perfection
- Anxiousness
- Social situations

SEMIOTICS

- Semiotics (human behaviour) and materiality within society:
he semiotics lecture challenged my ideas about how everyday objects can influence human behaviour and it enabled me to make the link between sneaker cultural and materialism (explored in my article in depth).

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Explore design as a language

How it effects how things are depicted

he rave flyer is early electronic music’s most emblematic artist medium. Rave flyers from dance music’s early days showcase a unique style of artistry that portrays the hustle, physicality, DIY spirit and harmony of the subculture in its various habitats around the world.

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Translating data

Visualisation

collecting data

info graphics

storytelling

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With Josh Crumpler on the design and layout, the team sought to give issue its own stamp - "to really give a sense of who the artist is," says Milo. In this sense, they wanted to distinguish how Harland was "very carefree" and how he had a "slightly punk" attitude on life, but also how his was was notably concise. "It was about bringing together those elements," continues Milo. "He is pleased with how it came out so that was a big plus."

Upon deciding on the aesthetic and feel of the magazine, Milo goes on to explain how they pulled many cues from postmodernism. Especially that of mixed-media, and how, with Harland producing his own self-portrait to be included in the issue, they wanted to juxtapose the photograph with a handwritten Q&A. "Harland's work merges a love of pop culture, abstract expressionism and wordplay," says Milo, "so the combination of these styles really fit the mould and influenced the design of Plaster." This conception effortlessly rings out from the magazine, with what Milo describes as "clashing Herb Lubalin-esque typography, DIY aesthetics with the minimal."

The magazine not only presents the artist through its considered visuals, it also goes deep into their practice. This means that Plaster was going to present an array of different media and content within each issue, and that it needed to provide a long-lasting identity that would be able to work with each varied artist. "Defying a strict limitation of weights and styling within the chosen typefaces, as well as use of colour, the intention is to create something that can remain expressive with each issue." Much like a canvas ready to be filled with vibrant works, the result for the first issue sees a neon yellow typeface and extended serif in the logo and headlines.

Inspired by Parkett and much of Purple Magazines earlier issues from the 90s, Plaster has a certain nostalgia and classic feel about it - yet what they're doing undoubtedly feels quite fresh. "We both felt there wasn't a contemporary art publication speaking to and for a youth audience," Milo continues. "We recognise the lines blurred between fashion, art and music, but we wanted to produce a publication that celebrated artists and people who, more so than ever, shape art tastes and beliefs."

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Plaster is a contemporary art poster magazine that speaks to and for a youth audience

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With Josh Crumpler on the design and layout, the team sought to give issue its own stamp - "to really give a sense of who the artist is," says Milo. In this sense, they wanted to distinguish how Harland was "very carefree" and how he had a "slightly punk" attitude on life, but also how his was was notably concise.

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Many of us are longing for nothing more than to be in a crowded, darkly lit venue, swaying closely to one another to the beat of a sound system. Because, quite frankly, the last time any of us went 'out out' and danced in a sweaty venue with a crowd of strangers feels like the bygone days of yesteryear.

Here to give you slice of nostalgia and to perhaps (partly) fill the hole of socially interacting with one another, is Ten Cities. A new publication from Spector Books, the hefty book tells the story of club music and cultures in 10 urban centres across Africa and Europe, a project that evolved over the course of 1960 to March 2020. With its functionally designed pages, conceived by designer Adriaan Van Leuven, Ten Cities looks beyond the typical signifiers and turns a focus on Nairobi, Cairo, Kyiv, Johannesburg, Berlin, Naples, Luanda, Lagos, Bristol and Lisbon. Comprising two essays per city, a playlist and a photo sequence, it's an in-depth look into the musical history of club culture.

The idea to publish Ten Cities first arose ten years ago, while the team had been organising co-productions between musicians and producers from Nairobi and Berlin at the Goethe-Institut Nairobi. A fascination and a load full of research began, which soon evolved into building a much larger narrative. "Let's try to speak about cities and their societies through the lens of music cultures," says Johannes Hossfeld Etyang, one of the editors of Ten Cities on the topic of what drove the publication. "Let's write music history in combination with political and urban history. Maybe we will see societies and cities in a clearer light if we look at them at night, and in particular at their sound spaces."

Co-editing with Joyce Nyairo and Florian Sievers, the team looked to bring in a wide mix of writers and photographers, including Tilman Brembs, Anita Baumann, Beezer, Royce Bett, Giovanni Calemma, Martin Eberle, Mosa'ab Elshamy and many more, plus writers such as Rui Miguel Abreu, Vitalii Bard Bardetski, Vitor Belanciano, Tony Benjamin and Kateryna Dysa, among others. Upon doing so, they asked the Goethe-Institutes in various cities for contacts and, says Johannes, "in some cases, we travelled to the cities to do research and find the right people." This meant they could build a network of 25 authors, "an amazing group" of cultural scientists, music journalists, club activists, musicologists, urbanists and historians. "They are both in the cities they write about, they live in them, or least have a long research relationship with the scene and city. This makes the book so multifaceted."

Alongside this medley of voices, the team brought in Adriaan on the design - briefed to create the visual language for an already "enormous background," he tells It's Nice That. With an aim to design and present all ten cities equally, "as this is the purpose of the entire project", Adriaan needed to work in a way that was exceptionally systematic. "If a well-known club capital such as Berlin, for example, had been the biggest chapter, that would have been inappropriate." As such, he proceeded with a typographic system that fit every piece of text on the same number of pages; each text features three font sizes, two line-heights, two margins, and one or two columns. "By combining these different options, we could control the length of teach text and create important layout variations," he says, "while still keeping a clear unity throughout the book."

What's more, Adriaan proposed the idea of keeping two separate flows of text and imagery running in parallel. "You could see it as two decks of cards," he says. He continues to describe how they wanted to avoid a repetitive book structure - one that's like a "layered cake" - instead opting for a structure that's quite the opposite, alternating between 18 pages worth' of text per essay and the imagery, "like layers of chocolate and pastry." While drafting the pages, Adriaan searched for script typefaces, rococo ornaments and marblings, going against the usual underground aesthetics found within the music scene. Yet the result was very much a "pale imitation of punk graphics", he says, something that appeared fake. So to combat this, he concluded with function and simplicity, putting the content out there in the most logical and clearest form.

Interested in the many personalities collating within Ten Cities pages, Adriaan cites the stories gathered from Africa and Europe as a "reversed Big Bang - elements from the world are brought into one point". Working in a manner of collage, Adriaan found the process stimulating. "I'm sure it will trigger readers to take an active position when going through the book," he says, provoking the audience to "definitely" search for tracks on YouTube, to Google certain events and go deeper into the content.

Florian, on the other hand, hopes the reader will look at these "nocturnal practices" of clubbing and notice its differences in music and dance, as well as its many similarities. "The latter, because everywhere humans are just humans, and to every human the night is a special time of imagination, open possibilities and the chance to try to be somebody else," Florian concludes. "Plus, everywhere people are looking for distraction from their everyday life; people want to get in touch with other people, people want to enjoy themselves."
Ten Cities is available at Spector Books.

Goethe-Institut: Ten Cities, published by Spector Books (Copyright © Spector Books, 2020)

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This book tells the story of club music across ten cities in Africa and Europe

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Many of us are longing for nothing more than to be in a crowded, darkly lit venue, swaying closely to one another to the beat of a sound system. Because, quite frankly, the last time any of us went 'out out' and danced in a sweaty venue with a crowd of strangers feels like the bygone days of yesteryear.

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This article was originally published in 2018 in the "Worth" issue of Eye on Design magazine. We're republishing it today in honor of Equal Pay Day.

Picture your favorite font. What do you see? The shapes and contours that inspire and excite you, or the person who designed it? Let's say you choose Helvetica. Do you picture the friendly counter of the lowercase or the smiling face of Massimo Vignelli, who made it famous? Bonus points if you pictured his designer wife, Lella, who shared his affinity for the modernist typeface.

The history of design has been written by both women and men, but there have been times when it was difficult to see where women have had a seat at the table, and just how significant their contributions have been. While the doors of design have always been open to women (sometimes just a crack, sometimes more), the industry has not been immune to sexism, outdated expectations around gender roles, and the claustrophobic effect of the glass ceiling.

The history of design has been written by both women and men, but there have been times when it was difficult to see where women have had a seat at the table.

It's no secret that no matter the industry, corporations are unfriendly to change: As of January 2018, women represented only 4.8% of CEOs on the Standard & Poor's 500. Female-only-founded startups received just 2.2% of 2017's total venture capital funding, and according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the gender wage gap is unlikely to close before the year 2059 if current trends continue.

Low numbers are concerning enough, but the rate of stagnation is cause for real alarm. Women are the chief executives of just he 22 of the 500 most profitable companies in the United States. T share of IPOs led by female CEOs in the United States has averaged around 5% since 2000, and the percentage of female senior venture capitalists has actually dropped from 10% in 1999, to just 6% in 2018.

As an industry that prides itself on being forward-thinking, designers owe it to themselves to turn their critical eye inward and look at just who's leading the charge for change. Gender parity and pay equity are still issues, but the landscape isn't actually all that bleak. And when compared to many other industries, design has actually come a long way, and women have always been part of the lifeblood of the design world-whether or not their contributions were acknowledged at the time. Lella Vignelli, after all, was not just Massimo's wife- she cofounded Vignelli Associates and ran the business for years. If the most effective change truly comes from within, the key to getting more women into management roles is to tap into the collective power they have within the field, a movement that's already underway.

The most crucial key to unlocking opportunities in graphic design to women is actually the women themselves.

Pay disparity in male and female artisans has been recorded as far back as the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century, when women were trained in artistic and production skills but paid a wage that was considered "supplemental" to their husbands' income. Decades later, during the advertising boom of the 1960s and '70s, women had a clear creative presence, though neither their salaries at the time nor the lack of recognition reflect that.

Design luminary Paula Scher started her career designing album covers in the CBS promotion department in the '70s, and while she later became one of the most famous designers in her field, she certainly wasn't alone coming up. Scher recalls a sense of community and camaraderie among herself and her fellow female designers. This group included influential designer Henrietta Condak, who Scher says, "helped her [illustrator] husband, worked three days a week, and did the best work in the joint." While Scher and her fellow designers knew they were hired because their talent was more "bang for the buck" than their male counterparts, she says that their real focus was always simply on the work. They produced the best design they could and believed the rest would come later.

Success did come later for Scher. She was hired as the first female principal at Pentagram in 1991, yet it would be decades before the same could be said of other women on a significant scale. One major downfall of the '70s was that talented female designers weren't given the tools to succeed as independent business owners, making it hard for them to launch their own companies and upend the status quo. Even in large, progressive cities, women were faced with sexism from both colleagues and clients. Scher notes that while women fostered their design skills, male-dominated business culture not only discouraged women from starting their own companies, but made it extremely difficult to win clients if they did.

Scher says that when trying to build up her business after leaving CBS "expectations were low." During her early days at Pentagram, she was often mistaken for a spouse at company events. Since then, Scher has redefined graphic design through her work with Microsoft, Citibank, MoMA, The Public Theater, and many more, meanwhile making significant headway in creating opportunities for other women on their way to top design positions. Pentagram now has five female principals in its U.S. and UK offices, most recently Astrid Stavro, who was hired in late 2018. While there is a long way yet to go for the industry at large, it's still encouraging to view the design world compared to other sectors.

"I didn't see the gender difference in a school setting, i t's only in the professional world that you start to see leadership roles mostly represented by men." -Min Lew

According to the 2019 AIGA Design Census, 61% of designers working today are women. The rate of female creative directors across the industry rose from 3% in 2008 to 29% today. While this number of women in leadership positions is certainly not the end goal, it indicates a positive momentum and genuine sense of progress. And with more than half of the industry being women, the chance to effect change is even more significant.

It's even more encouraging to look at the number of women graduating with advanced degrees in graphic design. According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 60% of graduate graphic design degrees go to women (by contrast, it's estimated that fewer than 50% of MBA students are women). However, this highlights the stark contrast between women in school and women in C-Suite positions. Why do these high numbers of female grads and working designers start to taper off the closer you get to the top?

As the global CEO at brand consultancy firm Wolff Olins, Sairah Ashman is one of the few women who has made her way up the ranks. Like Scher, she recalls a time when the expectations of women's professional goals were egregiously low. Her school counselor advised her to decide between being a secretary or a nurse. Luckily, she says, " I had different aspirations."

Even today, design education doesn't always set up students to succeed in the professional world. The priority of rigorous design programs is to build technical skills, learn design history, and create a portfolio of work, all of which is gender agnostic. But entering the workplace means navigating the gray areas of negotiating salaries, balancing family life, and projecting confidence in a world that is not always friendly to women. Many female design graduates feel unprepared for that, no matter how strong their work is. "I didn't see the gender difference in a school setting," says Min Lew, creative director at Base Design in New York City. "It's only in the professional world that you start to see leadership roles mostly represented by men."

The main differentiator between design and industries like tech and finance is the fact that design is a visual and product-oriented industry, driven by the power of creation. Scher says that while she and her contemporaries were building their careers, she took comfort from the fact that "design is a v isual profession-you can see if someone is good. That's the advantage every woman has. If you stay in the game and you do the work, you'll be recognized. Women have the work." In other words, while women in design are still fighting for power and recognition, they have, for half a century, at least been in the room.

"If you stay in the game and you do the work, you'll be recognized."-Paula Scher

The gospel of "the work" is a belief that many young designers share. Scher's fellow partner at Pentagram, Natasha Jen, notes that "gender never came to my mind until I was in more of a leadership position. I was very focused on my work and developing my skill set; just trying to be the best in whichever group I was part of."

The most crucial key to unlocking opportunities in graphic design to women is actually the women themselves. After hearing the personal stories of more than half a dozen women, it was heartening to learn that, in their view, the design world has bred a remarkable degree of compassion and cooperation among women in powerful positions, and a sense of responsibility to give back. As the New York Times recently noted, change starts in the boardroom. The same is true of the design industry: The most significant change has relied on women climbing to the top of the ladder and extending a rung to young up-and-comers.

Kat Gordon is one of these women. Gordon was taken aback in 2012 when she learned that grim 3% statistic about the amount of female creative directors in 2008. Having started her own agency years before, Gordon knew firsthand the challenges women faced when it came to moving into leadership positions. Her solution was to create the 3% Conference, an annual conference that teaches professionals from around the world best practices for managing employees, cultivating work/life balance, and fostering diversity in the workplace.

"Gender never came to my mind until I was in more of a leadership position."-Natasha Jen

"Sexism is not only asking somebody to sleep with you," Gordon told the the in 2017. "We're getting at those subtle things-how much your firm is celebrating women, how much you're giving them the stage to own the floor, to being in front of key clients, to participate in pitches." No longer just a two-day conference, Gordon's organization has launched MiniCons in cities around the world, a certification program for agencies that want to cement themselves as equality-driven, agency consulting programs, a student scholarship fund, and a series of significant research projects.

For Jessica Walsh, partner at Sagmeister & Walsh, a sense of internal frustration at the lack of women in power spurred her to curate a conversation series called Ladies, Wine & Design, in which women come together to seek knowledge and inspiration through mentorship circles, creative meet-ups, and portfolio reviews. Walsh's frustration, that there simply aren't enough opportunities available to women from the top down, is shared by many, creating a new paradigm where women fight from the ground up. The organization, which started in New York City, has spawned more than 200 outposts around the world. "We've heard stories of women who formed bonds through our meet-ups and who went on to create studios or new businesses together," says Walsh, "women who were inspired from the events to make career changes to pursue what they truly love doing; women who got the courage to ask for a raise or confront a coworker who was being sexist."

"Female leaders should be using our privilege to help others benefit."-Cat Hyland

For Cat Hyland, formerly the ECD of Portland-based agency Swift, "creativity is a team sport." Launched by Liz Valentine and Alicia McVey in 2007, Swift prides itself on being a female-led company. As a firm with an impressive history of female entrepreneurship, Swift's leaders feel an inherent duty to pay their insights forward. "It's really all about goal-setting and accountability," says Hyland. "Female leaders should be using our privilege to help others benefit. Mentoring makes all the difference. Investing in your people is one of the best ways to create change."

Yet even as women designers look inward at the design industry's own gender parity problems, most practitioners still have clients to contend with. Design doesn't exist in a vacuum; as part of a service industry, graphic designers often work with companies in an adjacent industry, whose values may or may not align with their own. Lew describes her professional agency experience as supportive and harmonious, with many women in director and staff positions. However, she notes that "as creatives, the reality is that we do deal with clients. It's been interesting for me to notice who's on the other side of the table."

Many female designers are also hopeful for a more inclusive future because of the nature of design itself. The goal of design lies not simply in economics, it's about creating something-from a typeface or logo to an entire brand identity or digital product-that speaks to and represents the world around us. The most significant change usually happens in direct proportion to the bottom line, and increasingly, consumers are flocking to brands with values (or, at least, purported values) that align with their own.

According to one 2017 study, 90% of millennials prize authenticity in advertising, but only 57% of consumers say that brands create campaigns that feel authentic. Global powerhouses Nike and Audi have debuted ad campaigns this past year that call attention to racial and gender equality, and to significant profit. After their ad featuring football player and social justice icon Colin Kaepernick, Nike says their sales rose 31%.

Successful firms intrinsically understand that a more diverse workforce leads to more dynamic, effective, and relatable design. According to Hyland, this heightened cultural awareness has presented both designers and clients with opportunities to educate. "Minorities deserve to see themselves in media," she says. "The future belongs to creatives, brands, and agencies that see how powerful design and advertising can be in that regard."

"Social media combined with cheaper tools that allow for a lower barrier to entry and the flexibility to work from home have all helped democratize who can become a designer or who can receive recognition and work."-Jessica Walsh

While the design industry hasn't been as demonstrably affected as Hollywood or news media by #MeToo, it has still felt the cultural shift the movement incited. "As a society, we're a lot more aware of gender inequality issues," says Jen. "And as women, we have the opportunity, as well as the responsibility, to actually shape and fine tune this movement so it doesn't fall into a simplistic battle between men and women."

Additionally, opportunities to work remotely has helped ease the pressures of family life, which is something that is still a very real concern for women in every industry. Walsh agrees, saying, "Social media combined with cheaper tools that allow for a lower barrier to entry and the flexibility to work from home have all helped democratize who can become a designer or who can receive recognition and work, and find success."

This past November, Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, the founder of the Gaia Project for Women's Leadership, took the stage at the 7th Annual 3% Conference and asked the audience to think of one commitment they could make to help steer the organization toward its goal of 50% female leadership. That may seem daunting, but history has shown us that daily perseverance and support from every woman working in design has made us all more empowered, each generation improving on the last.

The design industry is poised to be a leader in adapting to equality and making women's voices heard, in the boardroom and beyond. We haven't arrived yet, but reflecting on the experiences of the women who have made it to the top thus far, the future is in good hands. If everyone, both men and women, grasped the lessons those early female leaders have to teach, design stands to outpace other industries when it comes to creating a more inclusive workplace. Design is a discipline that improves only with a combination of self-awareness and keen perception. After all, you can't design the writing on the wall if you can't understand its message.

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Women Make Up Over Half the Design Industry-So Why Are There So Few at the Top?

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This article was originally published in 2018 in the "Worth" issue of Eye on Design magazine. We're republishing it today in honor of Equal Pay Day. Picture your favorite font. What do you see? The shapes and contours that inspire and excite you, or the person who designed it?

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Women have done as much as men to give visual life to music through album covers and magazine art, so why isn't their work better known?

When it comes to graphic design for music, names such as Stefan Sagmeister, Peter Saville or Jonathan Barnbrook spring to mind. It's well documented that the graphic design industry favours giving men the 'genius' treatment, while sidelining other genders and searching for the names of women on the inserts of album covers can often seem a fruitless task.

In actuality, female designers have contributed a wealth of visuals to music history. Take Laini (Sylvia) Abernathy, who communicated the celestial vision of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra. A wonderful article from Letterform Archive delves into Abernathy's past as an activist as well as visual communicator. It notes that her work was featured last year in graphic designer and educator Jerome Harris' exhibition, As, Not for: Dethroning Our Absolutes, which highlighted Black designers from the past century. This inspired the Letterform Archive to obtain Abernathy's album covers, and delve into her work for Delmark records.

Take the artwork for Sun Ra's Sun Song, in which a scribbled amber sun radiates warmth from the centre of the album cover. Paired with a rich red that errs towards tangerine, the colours jump out from the page, deftly illustrating the magnetic yet surprising elements of Ra's sound. The cover is a slick continuation from Ra's own graphic work, which borrowed from modernism, while evolving the style toward a certain deliberate imperfection, and an exploration of Black authorship.

Like Ra, Abernathy was keen to platform Black voices within her work. One of her best known works, a Chicago-based mural entitled Wall of Respect, was painted to celebrate prominent African Americans from walks of life such as music, politics, drama and literature. The poet Don L Lee, explains that "The Wall of Respect defied the modernist notion of 'art for art's sake' and was instead 'art for the people's sake.'" This reflected a belief stemming from the Black Arts Movement, which urged creatives to define Black art on their own terms.

While white jazz fan Bob Koester founded Delmark records in 1958, he commissioned Abernathy to work on jazz record covers, ensuring that the ethos of the Black Arts Movement rang true. The label is known to have commissioned at least three designs from Abernathy, one of which was a collaboration with her husband Billy, whose photograph of Roscoe Mitchell is starkly illuminated by Laini's bold concentric circles.

Abernathy's work was largely visible in the 1960s, but in 1970 another female music designer slid slowly into the spotlight, through the Editions of Contemporary Music label. ECM was founded in Munich by Manfred Eicher, who loved beautiful artwork and beautiful music, often at the cost of any profit from album sales. Designer Barbara Wojirsch worked with Eicher from ECM's inception, creating album covers that characterised the label's output.

Wojirsch studied the rules of composition so that she could know exactly how to break them. Her respect for the power of typography is demonstrated on artwork for Keith Jarrett's album In The Light, where carefully set letters are imprinted onto an undulating, textured surface, which could be anything from sand to stone. The resulting dreamlike atmosphere visualises Jarrett's musical expression in an unpretentious yet highly effective fashion, Wojirsch's signature style. Joined by designer and photographer Dieter Rehm in 1978, they produced cover after cover of quietly mesmerising imagery.

Having initially identified as a painter, Wojirsch moved into advertising but soon realised that she could not "tell people things that aren't true." Working for ECM allowed her to flex her creative muscles. While moving typographically between the conservative sans serifs and painterly lettering, Wojirsch always remained fiercely loyal to her modernist roots. She once explained that the design must pay homage to the photograph it is centred around: "It's a picture, we choose the picture to show it, not because we want to work with it." Wojirsch's reverence for the image did not stop her creating fiercely inventive typographic artwork, which ranged from hieroglyphic inspiration to Cy Twombly-esque abstract scribbles.

Gail Anderson 's work for Rolling Stone magazine stands in stark contrast to the hushed qualities of ECM's visual language. Having cut her teeth at The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and Random House's Vintage Books, Anderson arrived at Rolling Stone in 1987, and spent 14 years expanding music design from the covers of albums to editorial pages.

While working with art director Fred Woodward (both went on to be esteemed AIGA medallists), Anderson prioritised freedom of expression, working to translate the personality of a creative practitioner (whether that was a musician, actor or comedian) into visuals. The resulting covers are delectable in their visuals, and audacious in their typography.

A tongue-in-cheek rendering of Al Pacino's name in spaghetti letters, ensconced in a spoon hovering over its plate, is paired with a dramatic headshot of the actor, the serious fused with the satirical. A photograph of Chris Rock looms out of curly 1970s type, filling the page with its brash psychedelia, while a profile of Axl Rose makes the weird increasingly wonderful through letterforms that bloom into flowers. Anywhere else, this would be viewed as kitsch, yet Anderson commits so wholly to the aesthetic that she carries it off with style. Today, she chairs the BFA Design and Advertising Departments at School of Visual Arts in New York, and enjoys the fruits of a celebrated career in graphic design.

The insistence of the graphic design industry on framing male designers as genius rockstars, alongside pervasive sexism and invisible labour, is often responsible for female designers' lack of visibility. Today, efforts are being made to shine a spotlight on those overlooked in the past by the traditional canon, including a growing number of dedicated exhibitions. However we should not forget that it's equally important to pay homage to contemporary music designers working now as well as to their predecessors. It should not be left to future generations to discover them.

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The Female Graphic Designers Muted by the Music Industry - ELEPHANT

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Women have done as much as men to give visual life to music through album covers and magazine art, so why isn't their work better known? When it comes to graphic design for music, names such as Stefan Sagmeister, Peter Saville or Jonathan Barnbrook spring to mind.

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Scottish-born, London-based designer Caterina Bianchini joined us at December's Nicer Tuesdays at the tail end of last year, taking us through the process behind her work which filtered into See You At The Dance, a recent book compiling her poster work.

Caterina began her talk by showing her overall process for creating work, whether it be for a club night or a commercial client. Coining her own way of thinking titled "The art of seeing" from the influence of John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Bruno Manari's Art as Design, to lead the work from a conceptual point of view.

When it comes to the more logistical ways of working, Caterina then went on to explain the three methods she applies to graphic design. The first key thing you can expect from a piece by her is the personification of type where she'll think "about typography as if it was a person". From there she'll work on the layers, "building up type and juxtaposing it against colour blocks" and finally adding a touch of charisma to pull it together as it's "one of the main things I try to use and showcase in all my work."

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Caterina Bianchini on her three processes when designing posters

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Scottish-born, London-based designer Caterina Bianchini joined us at December's Nicer Tuesdays at the tail end of last year, taking us through the process behind her work which filtered into See You At The Dance, a recent book compiling her poster work.

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As a child, Crystal Zapata made collages out of magazine clippings, drawing everything she had collected together onto the page; this love soon grew into a passion for graphic design, and is visible in the delicately-layered posters she produces today.

Using her childhood knack for experimentation, Crystal's aesthetic is, in her words, "a cocktail of ideas, references, and influences that have been manipulated, stretched, inverted, deleted, and reverted". Her design is playful but contains beautiful formal moments. The abstract shapes are loud and fun, bouncing around each other, and the typography is minimal and robust, standing strong against a colourful background.

Crystal studied dance for 15 years. "My design practice is influenced by movement through the negotiation of space and moving elements around the page", she explains. The separate elements in her design form the steps of a choreography. A ballet or a salsa, the shapes cha cha cha and dance together, bounding across the poster in a manner that entices us to join.

The designer's work has been largely influenced by other artistic mediums. "I enjoy drawing with looser mediums like oil pastels and charcoal, as well as photographing on a 35mm point and shoot", she tells us. "Those textures weave themselves into my design". In several of her posters, we see gorgeous inverted photos, heat-maps and scratchy, waxy crayon.

Crystal is also heavily influenced by music, making posters for a bi-weekly dance party in her hometown, Chicago called Bricktown Sound. "Collaborating with people whose artistic practice provide sensory stimulation outside of sight and touch is very refreshing", she explains. "Listening and feeling become especially crucial tools for designing, and similar to music, design can be dissonant of melodic".

Each week the DJs are different, so Crystal makes the posters as eclectic and varied as possible; She emulates the energy of the music through her explosive designs. As the acts play vinyl, she feels it's necessary to pair this decision with analogue methods of design, a technique she enjoys combining with digital.

"I like using materials and textures that can't be digitally replicated", she explains. "There's a romance about messiness and materiality that I really love". After making work on the computer, she scans and prints it. We've all been there: pressing our faces against the cool plastic, scanning our hands, or in Crystal's case, her feet. "I love the super subtle halftone texture that the printer produces", the artist comments. "It provides a romantic tactility that digital imagery and typography typically lack".

For the artist, "graphic design is one of the most concise expressions of a cultural moment". Memes, logos, advertisements, are all a sign of the times. "Trying to unpack trends through visual culture is really fascinating to me", she explains. With her love of old record covers, Chicago house music flyers from the 80s and 90s and 1960s radical Italian design, we observe through Crystal's work, our generation's love for all things retro.

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Crystal Zapata's work joins the dots between radical Italian design and Chicago house

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As a child, Crystal Zapata made collages out of magazine clippings, drawing everything she had collected together onto the page; this love soon grew into a passion for graphic design, and is visible in the delicately-layered posters she produces today.

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A re-evaluation of acid house, a musical phenomenon that, as this film shows, did not spring out of nowhere, but owed its emergence to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain.

Acid house is often portrayed as a movement that came out of the blue, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza. In truth, the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK was a reaction to a much wider and deeper set of fault lines in British culture, stretching from the heart of the city to the furthest reaches of the countryside, cutting across previously impregnable boundaries of class, identity and geography.

With Everybody in the Place, the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller upturns popular notions of rave and acid house, situating them at the very centre of the seismic social changes that reshaped 1980s Britain. Rare and unseen archive materials map the journey from protest movements to abandoned warehouse raves, the white heat of industry bleeding into the chaotic release of the dancefloor.

We join an A-level politics class as they discover these stories for the first time, viewing the story of acid house from the perspective of a generation for whom it is already ancient history. We see how rave culture owes as much to the Battle of Orgreave and the underground gay clubs of Chicago as it does to shifts in musical style: not merely a cultural gesture, but the fulcrum for a generational shift in British identity, linking industrial histories and radical action to the wider expanses of a post-industrial future.

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BBC Four - Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992

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A re-evaluation of acid house, a musical phenomenon that, as this film shows, did not spring out of nowhere, but owed its emergence to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain. Acid house is often portrayed as a movement that came out of the blue, inspired by little more than a handful of London-based DJs discovering ecstasy on a 1987 holiday to Ibiza.

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90s rave culture than German techno magazine Frontpage.

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With a guiding belief that techno was a way of life, the anarchic Frontpage magazine covered the country's club scene with fun and flair

Few things paint a better portrait of 90s rave culture than German techno magazine Frontpage. Between its launch in 1989 and its final run in 1997, Frontpage was one of the leading voices of the country's house and techno movement. As Stefan Weil, one of the magazine's founding members, describes it, Frontpage was a "printed rave" and "graphic ecstacy", chronicling the explosion of an entirely new subculture bound by a fixation on the music of the future.

Frontpage was first published in 1989 as the in-house fanzine for Technoclub, an influential party with an exclusively electronic soundtrack that used to take place at Disco Dorian Gray. a nightclub inspired by Studio 54 and located, unusually, in Frankfurt Airport. Alex Azary, Technoclub's founder and a veteran of Frankfurt's club scene, financed the early version of Frontpage as a local promotional tool, but its scope broadened over time. When Azary's funding was exhausted, Frontpage contributor-turned-editor Jürgen Laarmann capitalised on the opportunity to move the magazine and its focus to what he viewed as a new, more progressive frontier - Berlin.

Frontpage was at the centre of a long held rivalry between Frankfurt and Berlin, with each city claiming techno for its own - despite varying definitions of the word. When Frontpage first launched, 'techno' in Germany referred to a Frankfurt sound whose backbone was formed by bands like DAF, Front 242, Neon Judgement, and The Klinik, but when Laarmann and other contributors relocated to West Berlin, they discovered an entirely new kind of techno subculture. Swapping established clubs and synth-punk bands for disused warehouses and acid house rhythms, the Frontpage editors found a scene that they felt was more forward-facing, where young East Germans would integrate into the West scene. "The impact of the GDR (East German) youth was massive on the movement. It was the sound of revolution... of liberation for them," says Laarmann. "There was nowhere that German reunification worked better than in the techno scene. On the dancefloor, with smoke, strobes, and a Westbam soundtrack, you couldn't tell who was East or West."

Partying was the main occupation of Frontpage and its team of 24/7 rave reporters, who treated the magazine like "the newsroom for all forms of electronic music in the 90s", as Weil puts it. They published stories about the emergence of new subgenres like trance and gabber, printed early stories on now-iconic artists like Joey Beltram, Westbam, Moby, and Aphex Twin, and mastered the 'you heard it here first' mentality with their extensive reviews of fresh releases. Serious music reviews were partnered with a very un-serious editorial voice characterised by an enthusiastic approach to self-destruction: Weil's favourite columns were usually the craziest, with names like 'Shopping on Speed' and 'Hardcore Decadence'. 'Octopussies', was a monthly column following a crew of female scenesters who Laarmann describes as "the Spice Girls before the Spice Girls"; the Octopussies were given a monthly editorial budget and encouraged to "attend parties, misbehave, and write about it".

Underpinning the more outlandish ideas was the fundamental belief that techno was a way of life, not just a music genre. Beyond covering clubs, festivals, and raves, a Frontpage contributor's job was to report on the "hot shit" in "wear and gear", says Weil, and record stores, promoters, and club-wear labels became as much a part of the magazine as the articles themselves. The magazine was free for the taking, but only available in Frontpage-approved spots like the Tresor nightclub or Hard Wax Records.

"There was nowhere that German reunification worked better than in the techno scene. On the dancefloor, with smoke, strobes, and a Westbam soundtrack, you couldn't tell who was East or West" - Jürgen Laarmann, Frontpage

Likewise, Frontpage's aesthetic mirrored techno's sonic innovation. In its early years, the magazine took inspiration from the DIY, cut'n'paste vibe of punk fanzines, but it soon honed a unique style of its own, with a maximalist layout and cutting edge art direction spearheaded by graphic designer Alexander Branczyk, whose over-the-top, ecstasy inspired designs virtually explode off the pages. "(Branczyk) translated the outstanding content and the attitude of the raving society into a very own graphic language," says Weil. Frontpage was the first magazine in Germany to be created entirely on a Macintosh, and it shows: analogue photographs were manipulated, altered, and transformed, and every font during Branczyk's five-year tenure as art director was a unique design.

"My inspiration was the dancefloor and the flickering lights in Berlin's dirty clubs," Branczyk says. "I wanted to make the design fucked up and messy." Though Frontpage was a celebration of decadent partying, Branczyk's time as art director was filled with more nights in than out. "I missed a lot of parties," he says. "While the other guys were dancing, I was designing! I did it for myself and, usually, by myself." According to Weil, "Branczyk was as important for electronic music, club culture, and rave as David Carson for indie, grunge, and post-rock." The team's obsession with new technology also led to Frontpage being one of the first ever magazines available online, under the the legendary domain techno.de.

Laarmann describes his Frontpage era romantically. After all, he and the team made a living having fun, and they have years worth of magazines to show for it. Naturally, Frontpage was more than just a magazine. Writers and editors also organized a number of parties, events, and tours - most notably Mayday, the first major rave in Germany, and the Love Parade, a techno and drug-fuelled march through the streets of Berlin. The combination of events in 1991 caught the attention of the media and became known as the 'German Summer of Love'. "Berlin was known as the place where a number of devastating events took place," Laarmann explains. "Wars, Nazism, and Communism. The techno movement was the first time in a long time that Berlin, and really Germany, were recognised for something in a positive light and had international appeal."

Frontpage came to a close in 1997, but 30 years later, many of its ideas have gone mainstream - Berlin is recognised as Europe's rave capital, and Germany is a techno haven. At the same time, with AfD starting to gain power in Germany and right-wing, nationalistic sentiments rising internationally, Laarmann still believes there is work to be done in realising the magazine's utopian vision. "Techno became a universal language with its own values, like tolerance, and denouncing sexism and racism," he says. "You know, being there back then, it felt perfect. We really believed we had a bright future of inclusion and freedom ahead of us. We have to ask ourselves what went to wrong in between."

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The 90s techno magazine that shaped German rave culture

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Few things paint a better portrait of 90s rave culture than German techno magazine Frontpage. Between its launch in 1989 and its final run in 1997, Frontpage was one of the leading voices of the country's house and techno movement.

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Drawing out the universality of design and highlighting the discipline as an omnipresent aspect of human activity, Deem Journal's stories recognise that "we all participate in the design process whether it's consciously or unconsciously. If we are more aware of this we can begin to draw inspiration from locally crafted solutions executed at a small scale, to help us at the larger scale, and continuously (re)imagine a new world." With this in mind, the first issue's theme Designing for Dignity was decided as a way to explore various value systems.

Regardless of skill or output, Designing for Dignity goes back to the fundamental root of the process - understanding. Nu says on this: "At the core of dignity is a shared belief in what is considered valuable. Before you can design, you must seek to understand. In that search for understanding is where you uncover the nuances that contribute to a dignified life." The inclusive concept means that those who don't necessarily define their practice under the umbrella of design can still engage and comprehend the journal's content. And wholeheartedly expressing this sentiment, the first issue delves into initiatives that dignify the experiences and priorities of systematically marginalised people. From going on a journey of understanding as to how we can cultivate a deeper relationship with our nourishment, to really thinking about human activity and interaction, everything is considered throughout the design process. And Deem Journal consistently "thinks about the relationships we need to establish with each other to design for collective needs and to sustain communal forms of life."

One feature, for example, looks into the design of hyper-local food systems. Titled Soul Fire Farms: Imagining Black and Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Deem Journal explores how this farm has crafted a safe space to organise and shift the power dynamic around food. Elsewhere, the magazine shines a light on the grassroots collective Hydropunk, a Bronx-based initiative amplifying the voices of creatives in the Bronx. And in yet another significant feature, the journal seeks to understand more about the psychology of space. Sitting down with WAI Architecture Think Tank, Deem weighs how architecture can liberate or oppress communities. In Curating Within the White Box, the Detroit-based curator Ingrid LeFleur explains "how much of our history has been falsified, misattributed and erased," and stresses "the importance of imaging and working toward futures as a means of manifestation."

When it came to putting together this comprehensive publication of culturally-rich stories however, the founders encountered a challenge. As media makers, Nu, Alice and Marquise were used to the bite-sized "snackable" social media content squeezed into the limited character spacing of a caption or image. With Deem being arguably the opposite, the founders faced a different way of working, embracing a slower, long-form media that gradually unwraps itself throughout a journalistic story. In an age of shorter content, the challenge was to remain fully present in the intricate weavings of this process, but clearly, the effort was worth it, evidenced in the wonderful multiplicity of Deem Journal.

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How can design shape inclusive dialogues? Deem Journal teaches us to value design beyond the aesthetic

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Drawing out the universality of design and highlighting the discipline as an omnipresent aspect of human activity, Deem Journal's stories recognise that "we all participate in the design process whether it's consciously or unconsciously.

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Radio broadcast

O.J.A.I. radio sonic artefacts show special all about Musique Concrete

O.J.A.I. radio sonic artefacts show special all about Musique Concrete.

A contribution with our project Oscillations, a live performance of electromagnetic walks through the radio spectrum.

Listen here

Exposition collective

Textilités

BeCraft - Anciens Abattoirs de Mons

Commissaire : Denise Biernaux

Exposition collective | Hors les murs

Du dimanche 9 mai au dimanche 1 août 2021 BeCraft - Anciens Abattoirs de Mons

Du mardi au dimanche de 12h à 18h

Réservations: https://www.becraft.org/event/textilites

Pour la première fois sur le site des Anciens Abattoirs de Mons, une exposition d'envergure entièrement consacrée à la création textile belge

Il aura fallu des siècles pour que l'homme mette au point et développe la technique de tissage et de maille. Le textile, pas à pas, a suivi l'évolution structurelle de notre société. Aujourd'hui, il aborde d'autres approches à travers l'utilisation de nouveaux matériaux et des nouvelles technologies. Le textile, aussi, a clairement acquis sa place dans le champ des arts plastiques contemporains et les créateurs belges y sont nombreux à être reconnus.

Le textile en tant que discipline artistique relevant ou non d'un savoir-faire traditionnel n'est plus à penser comme un produit fini mais plutôt comme un processus de pensée pluridirectionnel, " un nœud dont les fils se dévident à l'extérieur et se mêlent à d'autres fils issus d'autres nœuds " (Martin Heidegger). Autrement dit, le langage textile est " une chose qui vit " et pas uniquement une forme ou une matière.

BeCraft en collaboration avec la Ville de Mons et Les Drapiers, Centre d'art contemporain et de textile, met à l'honneur cette discipline en consacrant une exposition inédite d'envergure à ce sujet. Le commissariat est assuré par Denise Biernaux, fondatrice et directrice des Drapiers.

La sélection porte sur des œuvres de créateurs artistes résidant en Belgique tant plasticiens qu'artisans pour qui le textile est un des moteurs de travail. La trame de l'exposition se veut ainsi une réflexion sur la notion et le sens du textile, la relation entre les matières et les forces, justifiant par là-même d'une forme de " textilité ".

Ils exposent : Esther Babulik, BedrossianServaes, Marianne Berenhaut, Tatiana Bohm, Chevalier Masson, Hannah De Corte, Catherine de Launoit, Laurence Dervaux, Lili Desrues, Mathilde D'hooge, Jot Fau, Javier Fernandez, Dolorès Gossye, Daniel Henry, Jean-Pierre Husquinet, Julie Krakowski, Jean Pierre Muller, objects.projects., Leïla Pile, Elfie Poiré, Céline Prestavoine, Marianne Reding, Klaas Rommelaere, Diane Steverlynck, Charlotte Stuby, Linda Topic, Hélène Van Spaendonck, Graziella Vruna, Emma Van Roey et Claire Williams.

Exposition performance online

Je te relaxe en touchant des œuvres

la chaîne de Behind the Moons,

Je te relaxe en touchant des œuvres
commissariat de Caroline Delieutraz,

ASMR par Behind the Moons,

Textes et entretiens de Géraldine Miquelot,

avec : Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Gwendal Coulon,

Caroline Delieutraz x Vincent Kimyon, Carin Klonowski
Fabien Mousse, artiste créé par Raphaël Bastide, Claire Williams

exposition vidéo en ligne sur l'Instagram du Studio 13/16

Live chat sur la chaîne de Behind the Moons, mardi 10/03 à 21:00, en présence des artistes.

Le Studio 13/16 du Centre Pompidou

05/03/21

Exposition collective

La page manquante

Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris

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Lien: https://www.cwb.fr/agenda/la-page-manquante-renaud-auguste-dormeuil-expo

La page manquante - Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil

Exposition collective

Martine Aballéa | Paul Ardenne | Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil | Ivan Argote | Inke Arns | Alexandra Baudelot | Yann Beauvais | Julien Berthier | Karina Bisch | Sylvie Blocher | Carole Blumenfeld |Justine Bougerol | Brognon Rollin | Marc Buchy | Aude Cartier | Gaël Charbau | Nicolas Chardon | Laurie Charles | Philippe Chiambaretta | Claude Closky | Jean-Max Colard | Jordi Colomer | Julie Crenn | Rafaël Cuir | Béatrice Cussol |Alexandrine Dhainaut | Fabienne Grasser-Fulcheri | Clarisse Hahn | Julie Herry | Benoît Jacquemin | Véronique Joumard | Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux | Mehdi-Georges Lahlou | Lucie Lanzini | Laurent Le Bon | Claire Le Restif | Éva L'Hoest | Bernard Marcelis | Marianne Maric | Philippe Mayaux | Lola Meotti | Mathieu Mercier | mountaincutters | Valerie Mréjen | Melik Ohanian | Cécile Paris | Bruno Peinado | Dan Perjovschi | Sébastien Pluot | Chantal Pontbriand | Philippe Ramette| Philippe Régnier|Pierre-Olivier Rollin | Mahé Ripoll | Julie Rouart | Margaux Schwartz | Smith | Jean-Luc Verna | Marc-Olivier Wahler | Claire Williams

Artistes - commissaires - critiques

​A la faveur de sa Saison Fractale_Visions Parallaxes - paramétrée par la valeur heuristique du désordre et de la dynamique de la théorie du chaos, le Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles/Paris vous convie à une itération - en mode belgo-français - du projet La Page Manquante, implémenté par Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil en 2019 au Musée des Moulages de l'hôpital Saint-Louis à Paris en collaboration avec Marc-Olivier Wahler. Pour ce second opus, des plasticien.ne.s basé.e.s en Wallonie, à Bruxelles et en France y sont convié.e.s.

Il arrive, en consultant un catalogue d'exposition ou une revue artistique, qu'on ait le sentiment que quelque chose manque : une référence que l'on considère nécessaire, ou encore l'oubli d'une œuvre qui nous paraît importante. Parfois même, à la lecture de certains ouvrages, on se dit qu'on y avait notre place en tant qu'artiste. Au-delà des raisons de ce manque, le projet de La page manquante propose de réparer cette infâme injustice !

La page manquante propose donc d'inviter des artistes, critiques, directeur-trices d'institutions à rédiger la page qui leur semble manquante dans l'ouvrage de leur choix, et de la faire parvenir à Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil accompagnée de celui-ci. Cette page qui manque sera rédigée par leur soin en toute liberté. Elle sera insérée dans l'ouvrage, à la façon d'un addendum, une pratique éditoriale qui permet la mise à jour, la correction ou l'ajout d'informations à un livre déjà imprimé.

Le projet se propose de présenter les ouvrages à la façon d'une bibliothèque. Cependant, et à la différence d'un classement classique par ordre alphabétique, La page manquante adoptera un tout autre genre de classement tel que : oubli, vengeance, regret, complément...

Les ouvrages et leurs addenda seront exposés dans la galerie du Centre, selon une scénographie élaborée par Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil.

13/02/21

Pirate radio performance

Fountaine Source

Parc de Laeken

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Join the Finissage of Vitrien #5 - Fountain Source
Sint-Annafontein, Park van Laken, BXL
50.887379°, 4.352757°
13 FEB
14:00 installation
15:00 LIVE: Local 88.6Mhz FM ~ Stream

http://www.p-node.org
by ooooo ( http://www.ooooo.be)
avec Pascale Barret ( http://www.pascalebarret.com/), Léa Ricorday, Claire Williams ( http://xxx-clairewilliams-xxx.com)

FR Pour le finissage de l'installation présentée à BNA-BBOT, ooooo http://www.ooooo.be invite Léa Ricorday, Pascale Barret et Claire Williams à la fontaine Sainte-Anne à Laeken. Ensemble, elles testent un scénario où les fontaines de Bruxelles sont détournées en transmetteurs et récepteurs radios afin d'envoyer des signaux. Inspirées par la fabuleuse histoire de la paratechnique, elles détricotent des machines, des sons et des ondes invisibles qui nous permettent de communiquer dans le " maintenant ". Sans être conçu comme un acte de piraterie mais plutôt comme une action d'émancipation où le spectre électromagnétique devient un lieu commun.

Des ondes électromagnétiques artificielles ou naturelles, des ondes lumineuses, des ondes psychiques qui traversent nos corps et les paysages, les éléments animés ou inanimés. On dit qu'elles sont éternelles et ne meurent jamais, qu´elles divagueraient pour toujours dans le cosmos quand elles parviendraient à s'échapper de notre atmosphère. Elles sont de nature diverse, constituées de vibrations nées de la rencontre des champs magnétiques et électriques. Elles sont pour la plupart invisibles, elles voyagent dans le vide à la vitesse de la lumière et s'absorbent dans les surfaces conductrices qui leur servent d'antennes pour se propager.

Elles relient nos voix, nos conversations, nos messages, sons et données par le biais d'appareils fabriqués à base de fils de cuivre, d'énergie solaire, de fontaines aux pouvoirs miraculeux, de composants électroniques constitués de minéraux ou d'éléments aqueux. Ils disent que l'espace-temps n'existe pas dans le monde des ondes, que nous pouvons nous connecter et transmuter nos présences par leur biais.

La fontaine Sainte-Anne deviendra pendant quelques heures notre source d'émission d'ondes électromagnétiques, aquatiques et imaginaires, branchez-vous sur la fréquence radio 88.6 Mhz FM. Explorons ensemble ces paysages électromagnétiques en expérimentant avec nos instruments artisanaux, des fontaines détournées en antennes, des rituels aquatiques, des baguettes de sourciers, des élixirs émancipateurs, ou en encodant des histoires dans l'eau.

Près de la fontaine de Sainte-Anne, participez aux expérimentations en cours avec vos écouteurs et vos radios portables sur la fréquence hertzienne de 88.6 Mhz FM. Pour vous téléporter, installez-vous près d'une source d'eau avec une paire d'écouteurs et un téléphone connecté sur https://p-node.org pour créer un réseau de radios-fontaines.

EN For the finissage of the installation in the showcase of BNA-BBOT, ooooo http://www.ooooo.be invites Léa Ricorday, Pascale Barret and Claire Williams to the St. Anna fountain in Laeken. Together they test a scenario whereby Brussels fountains are used as radio transmitters and receivers, to send signals. Inspired by the fabulous paratechnical history, they unravel machines, sounds and the invisible waves that allow us to communicate in the 'now'. Not as piracy but as an act of empowerment where the electromagnetic spectrum becomes a commonplace.

Electromagnetic waves artificial or natural, light waves, psychic waves that travel across our bodies and landscapes, of animated or inanimated elements. We say that they are eternal and that they never die, they wander for ever in the cosmos when they manage to escape our atmosphere. They are different in nature and size, constituted of vibrations born from the encounter of electronic and magnetic fields. Most of them are invisible to the eye, they travel in vacuum at the speed of light and are absorbed by conductive surfaces that they use as antennas to propagate.

They reconnect our voices, conversations, messages, sounds and data's devices or hand crafted ones made of copper wires, solar energy, fountains with miraculous powers and electronic components of minerals and aqueous elements. They say that space and time does not exist in the world of waves, that we can connect and transmute our presences by them.

The fountain of Saint Anne will become for a few hours our source of emission of electromagnetic, aquatic and imaginary waves stay tuned on the radio frequency of 88.6 Mhz FM. Explore the electromagnetic landscapes by experimenting with our hand crafted instruments, fountains transformed in antennas, aquatic rituals, dowsing rods, elixirs of empowerment or by encoding water with stories.

Near the fountain of Saint Anne, join in the ongoing experimentations with your headphones and portable radios on the hertzian frequency of 88.6 Mhz FM. To teleport yourself, settle near a water source with a pair of headphones and a phone connected on https://p-node.org
to create a network of fountain radios.

09/01/20

Exposition collective

Code is Law - Centre Wallonie Bruxelles Paris

Centre Wallonie Bruxelles Paris

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La nouvelle exposition d'art numérique du
Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles
, "Code is law", du 9 janvier au 28 février 2021!

11/11/20

Exposition

Biennale Chroniques - Ghost in the machine

21 Bis Mirabeau, Espace Culturel Départemental, Aix-en-Provence

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DATE
Du 11 Nov. 2020 au 17 Jan. 2021
du mer. au dimanche de 11h30 à 18h30

Vernissage le 14
Voulez-vous vivre pour toujours ?
Ghost in the machine, le titre de l'exposition au 21bis Mirabeau, espace culturel départemental, évoque la métaphore du fantôme et cette conception du dualisme cartésien séparant le corps de l'âme, âmes perdues du passé qui viendraient hanter le présent et le monde des vivants. Depuis, la croyance dans les fantômes devenus une figure populaire, s'est progressivement éteinte, mais reste toujours vivant le mystère de la mort et ce désir d'immortalité poursuivi par les transhumanistes.

Les oeuvres de l'exposition nous interrogent de manière poétique et sensible voire humoristique et ironique sur ce vieux rêve humain. A travers les motifs de la Vanité, du spiritisme, du spectre, du zombie, du portrait-souvenir, les artistes rappellent la courte durée de l'existence humaine tout en mettant en scène la prolongation de la vie humaine avec l'aide de la science et des technologies.

En inventant le phonographe considéré comme un instrument capable d'immortaliser la voix d'un individu par delà la mort, Thomas Edison est un des premiers scientifiques de l'ère moderne travaillant sur des machines capables d'immortaliser des composantes de l'être humain et de donner corps à ces formes spectrales et fantomatiques. Fasciné par la mort et la survivance de l'âme, Edison lui-même consacra les dix dernières années de sa vie au développement de son projet inachevé, le nécrophone, un appareil scientifique permettant de communiquer avec les morts.

Au fond dans leur évolution, les techniques modernes de communication - le téléphone, la radio, le cinéma, la télévision, l'informatique... - n'ont pas fait disparaître cette notion de spectre. Au contraire, ces machines démultiplient soudainement les occasions pour nos " fantômes " de venir hanter nos vies, enregistrent tout ce qui au-delà ou en deçà de la perception humaine, jusqu'à nous offrir aujourd'hui la possibilité d'immortaliser nos données, et créer nos propres avatars fantomatiques dans le réel.

Commissariat : Mathieu Vabre
Co-production : 21bis Mirabeau, espace culturel départemental, et CHRONIQUES, Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques, imaginée par SECONDE NATURE et ZINC.

++ infos https://chroniques.org/event/21-bis-mirabeau/

08/07/20

Exposition, performance, concert

Interférances

Centre Wallonie Bruxelles Paris - Salle de spectacle 46 rue Quincampoix 75004 Paris

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Festival de substrat sonore - 1e édition

8 > 11 juillet 2020

On annule rien... on se contorsionne... on avise et on post-pose! Nouvelles dates de la Première édition du Festival de substrat sonore du Centre: Festival Interférence_S - du 8 > 11 juillet!

Installations ▬ Concerts Electroacoustiques ▬ Podcasts ▬ Pièces Sonores Immersives ▬ Fictions Radiophoniques ▬ Vidéos ▬ Performances

Guillaume Abgrall & Chiara Todaro, Blow Out Session, Dance Divine, Julien Devaux, Sebastian Dicenaire, Èlg, Vincent Epplay & Timo Van Luijk, Diederiek Peeters & Anne Lepère, Dominique Petitgand, Julien Poidevin, Myriam Pruvot, Claudia Radulescu, Anna Raimondo, Thomas Turine, Florian Van de Weyer, VOID, Claire Williams.

(...) On pourra répandre de fausses nouvelles à l'aide d'enregistrements diffusés aux heures de pointe. Ou introduire dans le discours enregistré d'un politicien des bredouillements et des bruits d'idiot. En brouillant les pistes, aux sens propre et figuré, l'on parviendra ainsi, non seulement à court-circuiter les réseaux d'information, mais encore à démontrer comment le système médiatique nous manipule. Un cours de subversion, par un maître de la contre-culture.
Evolution électronique 1
William S.Burroughs

En l'espace de ce siècle, la dichotomie entre son et bruit s'est dilatée et inexorablement associé aux progrès technologiques, de l'analogique au numérique, le substrat sonore s'est densifié. Sonder le son, c'est fondamentalement appréhender des approches parallèles du monde, c'est provoquer des chocs et perturber les sens.

L'exploration des sons traverse les territoires de création contemporaine.
Le festival INTERFERENCE_S se donne pour ambition de révéler une infime partie de la polysémie des explorations sonores et de mettre en évidence des créations développées à partir de matière sonore.

Pour cette première édition, la programmation est composée d'artistes basé.e.s en Belgique francophone, soutenu.e.s par des opérateurs prescripteurs de la création radiophonique et sonore comme l'ACSR qui a accompagné une série d'œuvres présentées dans cette édition, Transcultures, le Vecteur (etc) mais également d'artistes français dont les démarches nous sont apparues comme aussi singulières que référentes. Une rétrospective dédiée au créateur sonore Èlg constitue également un des temps forts du festival.

Pour enjeu obsessionnel : le son - non pas comme médium illustratif, ni comme vecteur magnifiant une image statique ou en mouvement mais le son comme matière propre.

Délibérément décloisonnant, s'infiltrant dans les espaces poreux du Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles | Paris, INTERFERENCE_S agrège des œuvres laboratoires - de l'installation au podcast en passant par des concerts électroacoustique, bruitistes et des films - des oeuvres dont les développements génèrent l'émergence de nouveaux lieux et territoires de monstration et d'écoute tout comme elles reconditionnent la question des modes de production et de diffusion.
Tel un manifeste, le festival vise à faire état d'une création vibrante.

Tel un manifeste, il vise à faire état d'une création vibrante.

Stéphanie Pécourt

12/03/20

Exposition collective

SIGNAL - Espace(s) Réciproque(s)

La Friche de Belle de Mai, Marseille

⇩⇧

Commissariat : Lola Meotti et Aurélie Faure
Younes Baba-Ali , Justine Bougerol, Brognon Rollin, Marc Buchy, Claude Cattelain, Edith Dekyndt, Benoit Jacquemin, Lucie Lanzini, Eva Lhoest, Julien Maire, Armand Morin, mountaincutters, Anna Raimondo, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Claire Williams
Evénement fb

Catalogue d'exposition pdf

SAISON PARALLÈLE

Pour une première, à Marseille, Le Centre inaugure ce qu'il qualifie de Saison Parallèle à celle développée en ses murs, à Paris, et ce avec l'étroite collaboration de scènes et espaces majeurs de la cité phocéenne.
Cette saison s'inaugure le 13 mars 2020, à la Friche la Belle de Mai - en la salle du Panorama - par l'exposition SIGNAL_Espace(s) Réciproque(s) signée d'un binôme curatorial constitué d'Aurélie Faure (Fr) et de Lola Meotti (Be). SIGNAL présente les œuvres et processus artistiques de 15 artistes belges et internationaux basé.e.s à Bruxelles.
Cette exposition lance officiellement la Saison Parallèle implémentée sur Marseille - de mars à octobre 2020, soit en préfiguration et à la faveur de la 13ème Biennale européenne de création contemporaine MANIFESTA.

AMBITION

Dés-assignation - Le Centre n'a pas vocation à contribuer à consolider un méta-discours visant à canoniser ce que serait l'art bruxellois. Tout ce qui procède de la sacralisation, de la production d'un discours répondant à une architectonique mentale linéaire dans lequel une esthétique, un mouvement en isme s'imposerait pour mieux se succéder, ne semble pas procéder de l'ethos belgicus.SIGNAL n'a pas vocation à témoigner d'autre chose que ce dont l'exposition témoigne, c'est à dire, du choix délibéré, assumé de deux curatrices belge et française dans le foisonnement artistique dont Bruxelles est le réceptacle. Car s'il est une chose incontestable, c'est qu'en effet, en l'espace de ces quelques dernières années, nombreux sont les artistes de par delà nos frontières qui sont venus trouver en cette capitale européenne un terrain propice à l'expression de leurs trajectoires artistiques. Notre ambition ne se borne donc pas à établir un schéma narratif totalisant et supra visant à appréhender la scène visuelle bruxelloise mais elle vise au contraire à dégager ce qu'il y a de fascinant dans l'hétérogénéité, la non- solubilité des pratiques artistiques.

18/10/19

Exposition

Tonotech - Le Signe Centre National du Graphisme

Le Signe Centre National du Graphisme - Chaumont France

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De toutes façons...
Design graphique et textile

Exposition
17.10.19 AU 22.03.20

Par sa plasticité, le tissu permet des interactions avec son environnement. Porté, flottant, en volume ou en deux dimensions, les créateurs jouent avec ses qualités. Les graphistes, dont l'art consiste à mettre en forme des messages, se saisissent avec plaisir de ce support pour imaginer des drapeaux, des vêtements détournés ou encore des parures trompe-l'oeil.

La première partie de l'exposition conçue par le Studio GGSV, designers, artistes, pensionnaires de la Villa Medicis, immerge le visiteur dans une succession de cinq "period rooms" fantasmagoriques, de la Maison hantée à Technicolor, constituées chacune d'une dizaine d'œuvres mises en scène. Ces objets textiles interrogent les notions d'usage, de représentation, de texture et de motif, partagées par le design graphique et textile. Les histoires que cette réunion d'œuvres hétéroclites permet d'imaginer sont accompagnées d'un texte de l'écrivaine Laure Limongi.

Commissariat & Scénographie
GGSV
Gaëlle Gabillet
Stéphane Villard

Commissariat & Scénographie
Structure Bâtons
Lucile Bataille
Sébastien Biniek

https://www.centrenationaldugraphisme.fr/le-signe/expositions/de-toutes-facons-design-graphique-et-textile

16/11/19

Workshop

Workshop LUMEN#4

Tournai

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Inscriptions ici: https://www.maisondelamarionnette.be/fr/centre/evenements-1/lumen/

#Installation #électronique #son #textile
Du 23 au 27 octobre 2019
Au Centre de la Marionnette

Une installation où des hauts parleurs ont été créés avec des techniques de broderies. Les spectateurs sont invités à activer les hauts parleurs ne plaçant des boules aimantées au centre des formes cuivrées créant ainsi un champ magnétique. Une composition sonore et vibratoire se joue entre les huit broderies rendant palpable le phénomène sonore.

20/09/19

Exposition

Panorama 21 - Le Fresnoy Studio National

Le Fresnoy Tourcoing

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Vernissage : vendredi 20 septembre de 18h à minuit

HORAIRES

Mercredi - dimanche, 1er novembre 14h-19h
Fermé le lundi, le mardi et le 25 décembre

TARIFS

Tarif normal 4€
Tarif réduit 3 € (demandeurs d'emploi, étudiants, seniors)
Entrée libre pour les détenteurs de la C'Art et les Amis du Fresnoy

TOUS LES DIMANCHES

Exposition en accès libre.
Visite guidée gratuite - 16h

ACCÈS

Métro

Ligne 2 station Alsace

Bus

ligne 30 direction 'Forest rue de Tressin' ou 'Hem 4 Vents', arrêt Fresnoy.
Consulter les horaires des bus.

Train

Gare SNCF de Roubaix (emprunter la passerelle, suivre rue du Fresnoy, rue du Capitaine Aubert, puis rue du Fresnoy)

Voiture

De Paris ou Lille : Autoroute direction Roubaix-Villeneuve d'Ascq, puis voie rapide direction Tourcoing Blanc-Seau, et sortie n°9 Le Fresnoy
De Gand ou Bruxelles : autoroute direction Lille, sortie n°13a vers Croix-Wasquehal, puis direction Roubaix, et sortie n°9 Le Fresnoy - Studio national
Coordonnées GPS : 50.700318, 3.154566

17/10/19

Workshop

Future Narratives of Wearable Technology

Bozar Centre for Fine Arts Rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Brussels, Belgium

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13:30 - 15:30 Future Narratives of Wearable Technology

Speculative Thinking on Future Wearables: A workshop for specialists. Facilitator: artist Claire Williams (Belgium)

Co-facilitators: Eva Durall, Aalto University, Learning Environments Research Group and Ann Peeters, SEAD, A network of Space Ecologies Art and Design.

During this workshop we will speculate together about scenarios of what we expect our future wearable technology's should be. Looking back at traditional textiles cultures and our production systems for the fashion industry, we will sketch how we want our clothes to reflect our world and what stories we want them to tell and leave behind us.

link: https://www.aalto.fi/en/events/sustainable-transformations

Workshop Textile, Hacking & Dispositifs Sonores

La Condition Publique, Roubaix

Infos et inscriptions ici: http://www.laconditionpublique.com/evenements/master-class-avec-claire-williams-textile-hacking-et-dispositifs-sonores/

"La Condition Publique, La Manufacture des Flandres, Claire Williams (designer textile) ainsi que Thierry M'baye (designer sonore) vous invitent pour deux jours de recherche et d'expérimentation le samedi 12 et dimanche 13 mai autour du textile, du hacking et du son, la f abrication de dispositifs sonores à base de textile augmenté (utilisation de machine à tricoter hackée, encres conductives, brodeuse numérique, fer à souder et petits composants électroniques)."

Performance collective

La Nuit des Arts - Une ballade électromagnétique

La Condition Publique, Roubaix

A la Condition Publique de Roubaix, place Faidherbe
Dans le cadre de la Nuit des Arts
" UNE BALADE ÉLECTROMAGNÉTIQUE "
Équipez-vous des artefacts étranges de l'artiste et promenez-vous entre la Manufacture et La Condition Publique.
Partez ainsi à la découverte des ondes sonores fantômes et habituellement soustraites à l'oreille humaine.

Durée : environ 40min - À partir de 10 ans.
http://www.laconditionpublique.com/
DÉPARTS :
de La Manufacture : 19:00 ou 22:00
de La Condition Publique : 20:30

Gratuit

Inscription obligatoire auprès de la structure de départ, par téléphone:
La Condition Publique: 03 28 33 48 33
La Manufacture : 03 20 20 98 92

Atelier/Workshop

Hauts Parleurs Vibreurs

Le Fresnoy, Roubaix

Au Fresnoy, 22 rue du Fresnoy à Tourcoing
Atelier " HAUTS PARLEURS VIBREURS "
Durant cette atelier, nous nous inspirerons de l'exposition Océans pour fabriquer des hauts parleurs vibreurs.
Ces hauts parleurs ont la particularité de vibrer aux sons des océans enregistrés par des bio acousticiens qui étudient les sons marins tels que l'activité des bateaux, poissons, chants de baleines ou des tremblements de terres. Certains de ces sons ont des fréquences inaudibles à l'oreille humaine mais grâce à la vibration de nos hauts parleurs, nous pourrons ici les ressentir.

10-14 ans
http://www.lefresnoy.net
Gratuit
De 14h à 16h30
Réservation: accueil@lefresnoy.net

Atelier Tisseurs d'Images

MUBA, Tourcoing

Dans le cadre des ateliers " TISSEURS D'IMAGES " du 5 au 9 mars.
Le 9 Mars avec Claire Williams : " Lors de cet atelier nous observerons et analyserons les tissus Coptes présentés lors de l'exposition Chrétiens d'Orient. Nous nous inspirerons des motifs et techniques textiles utilisées afin de créer des textiles sonores, en y incorporant des fils conducteurs d'électricités et de l'électronique, qui pourront ainsi être activés au touché. "

8/12 ans

Inscription à la semaine : 20,50€
Inscription à la séance : 5,50€

Réservation par mail : reservation-muba@ville-tourcoing.fr
ou par tel au 03 20 28 91 60

Atelier/Workshop

Atelier Tricot 2.0

Atelier "TRICOT 2.0", le 17 mars
Le 17 mars, la Ludomédiathèque Colette vous invite à découvrir le vaste monde de l'impression sous toutes ses formes. Sérigraphie, impression 3D, linogravure, pop-ups, tampons ou badges personnalisés n'auront plus de secrets pour vous.

Claire Williams, artiste invitée pour l'occasion vous fera découvrir sa machine à tricoter piratée connectée à un ordinateur qui vous permettra d'imprimer n'importe quel dessin ou motif... en tricot !

3 Ateliers:

- 10:00-12:00 : sur réservation / 18-25 ans
- 14:00-16:00 : sur réservation / A partir de 8 ans
- 16:00-18:00 : entrée libre sous réserve de place disponible

Gratuit
Réservation par mail à l'adresse mediatheque@ville-tourcoing.fr
ou par tel au 03 59 63 43 00

Atelier/Workshop

Atelier Textile Sonore

A la Ludomédiathèque de Tourcoing, 27 rue Roger Salengro
Atelier " TEXTILE SONORE " le 6 mars de 14h à 16h
Atelier de création numérique dans lequel il vous sera proposé de fabriquer votre propre haut-parleur grâce à un tissu conducteur. Venez découvrir ce mariage étrange entre textile et numérique !

8-15 ans

Gratuit
Réservation par mail à l'adresse mediatheque@ville-tourcoing.fr
ou par tel au 03 59 63 43 00

E textile Summercamp 2014
Workshop given with Maurin Donneaud

These last years hackers and makers have started to open up knitting machines and found new ways to hack them by allowing the machines to be controlled directly by a modern computer. These hacked knitting machines become a sort of textile printer. Having a direct communication between digital tools and the knitting machine pushes the boundaries of traditional knitted patterns and gives us the opportunity to think of new way's in conceiving patterns .

In this workshop we will explore how our knitting machine can become a way of printing out generated data on a textile surface.First we will show how the monitoring system and the arduino controls the knitting machine as well as how the machine works in general.

We will then experiment hands on with field recordings and capture data of our surrounding environment. Our data cartography's will then be translated and visualised with Pure Data or other sensors that you may wish to explore. This will be sent to the machine to be knitted out. These patterns can be read as a visual translation of rhythms, silences, movements and noises embedded in a palpable knitted surface. At the end of the workshop we would like to discuss the possibilities of other tools to experiment with different sensors and pattern visualisation which can be continued in the week.

-> For details on tools we will be using : https://github.com/MaurinElectroTextile/KnitHack_KH940

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y9WFI--JzNA" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8DLjwJV1ir4" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nwl5X1No6JU" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Scanning and (re)listening to knitted spectrograms with EJTECH at etextile summercamp 2014

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/106191962" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

Visualising sound using spectrogammes:

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Radio broadcast O.J.A.I. radio sonic artefacts show special all about Musique Concrete O.J.A.I. radio sonic artefacts show special all about Musique Concrete. A contribution with our project Oscillations, a live performance of electromagnetic walks through the radio spectrum.

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https://waitingroom.press

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We can only imagine the downtrodden feeling that comes with losing a pitch or some of your favourite work being cut out of a brief by a client. Feeling excited about a concept and seeing it shift is just a part of creative working, and more often than not it works out for the best. But to tackle this feeling DR.ME, the Manchester-based creative studio who consistently create projects with heart, take hold of the pieces and ideas they're fond and publish them in their own zine, Fin?

Regularly published digitally as a PDF zine edition on the last Friday of every month, Fin? collates "unfinished, unrealised, killed client and personal work alongside forgotten work found in drawers or hard drives," DR.ME tells It's Nice That. This digital version is free for fans of the studio, but limited to 100 downloads, "with the idea being that people can P.I.Y (print it yourself)," he says. Each of these monthly editions includes around 20-40 pieces of DR.ME work, amassing a bank of 100 bits and bobs over a few months. Once the bank is full, the studio design a print edition twice a year, "a selection of the greatest hits" of around 35 pieces. "Simply, it's an experiment and an outlet for the studio so that we avoid becoming too precious over an idea, pushing us to constantly make new work rather than regurgitate and re-contextualise old work," the studio explains.

The latest printed edition of Fin? features a bunch of brilliant snippets from the projects DR.ME have worked on recently. A wide variety of graphic design, it features "outcomes that fell on the cutting room floor for people like Mick Jagger to Young Thug, The Tate to Hivern Discs," DR.ME points out. "Commercial works aside, we really want to continue to publish Fin? as we find it hugely beneficial as a studio to have this outlet in order for us to constantly create new work and for us to share and give insight into the inner workings of the studio."

Personality is the first thing you notice about Fin? whether scrolling through a PDF version or flicking through the printed zine. Considering DR.ME dip in and out of working on so many different disciplines, "it's a real show of our studio in microcosm, from collage to painting to photography and illustration," the studio continues. "It allows us to show some personal work which otherwise might seem strange or random on its own, taking in curation and publishing on the way. It also gives a bit of an insight into the heavy outlay of work we create when working on a project and we hope gives a deeper insight into the inner working of DR.ME as a collaborative studio, although most of the work is either one (Ryan) or the other (Mark) which is also a fun game to play."

Asking the studio which bits from the most recent edition of Fin? are personal favourites, more often than not its work that was cut from a client brief that is still playing on the mind of DR.ME. "We had a lot of fun working on the single campaign for Mick Jagger and actually prefer the killed work from this project as opposed to the final artwork which was used, so that's included in there." Another is a few rejected pieces from recently working on an exclusive print with The Tate, hinting at how many staples of the creative industry the studio have worked with this year. "Because they're such household names it was exciting on a very basic level, but also because these huge cultural characters came to us and asked us to make work in our visual language and allowed us complete freedom to do what the fuck we wanted, which we did! The fact that we can garner this level of trust from such influential institutions is humbling." Other bits include an on-going project the studio is doing with Crack magazine, killed t-shirt ideas for Hivern Discs and a rejected book cover from its collaged focused book Cut That Out.

On asking DR.ME if it has any plans to expand on the work included in the studio explains that there isn't. "Once it's in Fin? the life of that piece is over, time to think of something new. You could say Fin? is the graveyard of DR.ME, but at the same time, it gives the work a new lease of life and still exists for people to enjoy. And it smells great."

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DR.ME release the latest issue of Fin? filled with killed projects and ideas that never made it

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We can only imagine the downtrodden feeling that comes with losing a pitch or some of your favourite work being cut out of a brief by a client. Feeling excited about a concept and seeing it shift is just a part of creative working, and more often than not it works out for the best.

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“A prayer to the future”: The process behind the handmade recycled book designed to be read in 1000 years

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The Ho Chi Minh City-based agency Ki Saigon takes us through Letters to the future, a series of letters to our great-great-great-grandchildren as told through recycled plastic.

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Breaking down Bias - Stuart hall

Representation theory

Stereotypes

representation and the media

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Women and sexualisation

Sex sells - adverts

'Why don’t you just walk' - London - mens ignorance

how easy and quick it is to find women being sexualised- eg google image

“Feminism promotes personal empowerment, something that, when connected to education, becomes a potent tool for change” Judy Chicago

normal things being sexualised for women

women’s body sells but women’s brain doesn’t

women underrepresentation

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Mums old love letters

Symbolising love through objects - flower project

Relationship breakdowns

Being able to found love everywhere

Family - roots - family tree

finding/ learning about family through memorabilia/ images

'TheFiveLoveLanguages'

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Retelling storys - storytelling

Stories of the past through old letters/ notes/ images

Learning about family through archiving

Collectors

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MUSIC GENRES

Music genres - the foundations - where it was derived

Dance - linking to how music started - old clubs

Dance styles - movement - expression

Rave culture - music associated with groups of people

Music and emotion and the big part it plays in our life

Festivals - raves - concerts - events

Bringing people together

Communites, segregation - bringing people together and society can also isolate them - society shunning youth culture group

Design associated with music genres - punks - anti design

Exploring the graphic design/ visual lanaguage associated with raves

Sound- sound waves - effects of the body

Translating sound

translating emotional response to music

Breakdown of the rave scene

raves as a political act

underground culture

visual tribute to where music genres bEgan

reinterpretting historical material

public perception V what actually happens

women within music industry - female representation

Encouraging people to go back out after the financial impact covid had on life events

the “nocturnal practices” of clubbing, music and dance.

club scene

Locations

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Cyanotype - crochet

Collage

Animated collage

Translating data

Booking binding/ publications

Riso & Screenprint- printing on materials

Crochet

Knit

Collage

Translating data

Editorial design

web design

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Interviews - hands of with subject

Participatory practise, using audience within work

Community practise- bringing people together

Using found imagery within my work and re designing it

New approach - more experimentations/ prototypes/ tests

Scale

More feedback to help with communication of my work

Using a process that reflects narrative

Data Visualisation

Translating data

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UNIT 8 LECTUE WITH JEAN JACQUES LESCURE who explored the circular economy,  inspired to think about how i can keep resources in use for as long as possible. Extract the maximum value from them by recovering and regenerate materials at the end of each service of life.
This made me feel conscious when thinkig about materials i use

PIERRE BOURDIEU encouraged me to apply his FIELD THEORY to my practise, to take a step back and examin the environment in which I work

Theory of Dérive, letting the journey dictate when I produce and not being set on an outcome