Concept

The project “the pain of everyday life” is a city-intervention and a digital art performance addressing public and private space within the realm of everyday constraints. It resembles an urban interface for an invisible city, an architecture which is subconsciously perceived and which constantly oscillates as resonant landscape, consisting of electromagnetic waves.

A chest strap (corset) with high torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as fetish object. The higher the wireless signal strength of close encrypted networks, the tighter the corset becomes. Closed network points improve the pleasurable play of tight lacing the performer‘s bustier. Thus, constituting the aether as a space of possible pregnancy, filled with potential access-points to the networks of communication. Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a schizogeographic pain-map which is fetched from GoogleMaps servers with automated scripts. By wearing the straight-jacket, the artist not only writes, but is at once also able to read the city code.

The outcome of his walk provokes an emergence of a city-shaped body. 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. Therefore, the artist becomes the 21st century flaneur who balances along sensual perceived pain and the torture of everyday routes in a very special Arcades Game Project.


“The pain of everyday life” is a critical performance addressing public and private space and their paradigm shift in the realms of everyday constraints, therefore the relation of abstract information layers to our everyday life. Within urban systems, as we are experiencing them right now, an invisible architecture is perceived and superimposed which constantly re-assembles a resonant landscape, consisting of electromagnetic waves. It bypasses human, buildings as well as vehicles through the streets of a so called Maxwell City. The restriction as such and its augmented invisibility are the source material for Gordan Savicic.

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A chest strap with high torque servo motors (muy fuerte mi amigo!) and a wifi-enabled gaming console (Nintendo DS lite) are worn as fetish object. Thus, when approaching an enclosed encrypted wireless network, the strap reacts immediately. The higher the wireless signal strength, the tighter the jacket becomes. This technique, also called Inverse War-Driving, challenges the much overhyped discourse about locative and wearable media. Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a schizogeographic* pain-map. The 21st century flaneur balances along sensual perceived pain and the torture of contemporary Arcades sans fil.

Michel de Certaeu stated about citizens and their everyday movements:

They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers “Wandersmaenner”, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen.(2)

By wearing the straightjacket, the Wandersmann not only writes, but is at once able to read the city code. Electromagnetic waves are forming the chest strap, thus shaping the invisible architecture directly onto the human body. As another countermove the mapping procedure is recorded on a GIS-layered map which keeps track of ordinary everyday walks and its chosen alternative routes. By displaying the playful approach of the wearer, it reveals not solely a psychogeographic pain-map, but as a result also the wearer’s admiration for gentle tortures as well as the alteration of everyday routines in RealPlay.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure. (Marquis de Sade)