“What is affect…if not representation’s own essential ‘out-of-phaseness’ with itself?”*

Over the last four years Matt Gingold has been building ‘Orkestras’ that simultaneously enact and reflect upon technology in contemporary society. In Phase Orkestra the methodologies and aesthetics of social media, particle physics, techno (party) culture and algorithmics are intentionally entangled – mirroring the often hidden relationships between technology, politics, spirituality and commerce. The work is a serious, yet humorous attempt to superpose the psychoanalytic and philosophical meanings of “affect” with the current crisis of “effect” in the relationship between science and technology - where the latter is increasingly more relevant than not only religion and politics, but the very science that (mass) produces it in the first place. Part experiment, part shamanistic sculpture, Phase Orkestra is an exacting arrangement of light, sound and space, designed to stimulate the body at the (sub)liminal edge of perception.

• Joan Copjec ‘May ‘68 The Emotional Month’ in Slavoj Žižek (ed) Lacan: The Silent Partners (2006), p94.

audiovisual installation

Grant: May–July 2015, Werkleitz (DE)