The pain of everyday life
At the university where I work there is a crazy thing that happens every Thursday morning. About a month ago this motherfucker professor of History of Something comes into my office with a letter from the Director that authorizes her to ask me to shut down "all the wireless internet services in the building" during the time of her class. The first Thursday this happened I thought the Director was playing with me, so I pretended to shut down the connection and after Professor Schizo was out of my sight, I set it up again for the good of our millions-paying students and employees. After five minutes, Schizo came back furious, agitating a remote control-shaped tool in her hands where she could clearly see "bars going on". Yep, being obsessed with the possibility of catching cancer from electromagnetic waves, she decided to own a wi-fi network detector! Can you imagine how difficult her obsessive-compulsive life is? Anyway, when I saw this data visualization project from Gordan Savicic, I could not stop thinking about the Professor and how much I would like to put her in one of Gordan's vests.
Gordan Savicic is an electronic practitioner, "social-circuit-bender" and the founding member of the artist collective ZugZwangZukunft. His new project “Constraint City. The pain of everyday life" is a wearable wi-fi networks detector shaped in the form of a fetish bustier that translates the strength of a signal into physical pain (well, pleasure, some would say).
Of course this project reminded me of certain "cybernetic" artworks like Stelarc's Parasite or Stahl Stenslie's project The Walker where the body and the immerse environment of information have some kind of "symbiotic relation" as Stelarc would call it. Despite the apparent similarities, Savicic's device is much more interesting to me because Gordan doesn't just display it in front of an audience like Stellarc does but actually wears it in the city. The bustier becomes a real power object for the artist or for anyone that would wear it to know the city through their body's pain. The artist performed a city walk in Vienna, Rotterdam and Berlin recently and the outcome of his walk provoked an emergence of a "city-shaped body" which is undoubtedly very sexy.
The performer shapes the city's landscape with his pain/pleasure choices. "The map keeps not only tracks of all wireless networks along the route, but also the wearer’s détournement when entering a very dense network place, a so-called pleasurable pain zone."
