EKSTASIS
Techno music culture is more than just a platform for drug use. It is a ritual to perform, an escape from the realities of urban life and an embrace of technologized pleasure. For many the experience is even spiritual, with participants feeling ‘close to God’ in the grips of bass-drum induced ecstasy. The project celebrates techno music culture by highlighting the spiritual value it offers to young people on the fringes of conventional society. Religious and techno rituals have numerous similarities and the desired destination of both is to reach ecstasy. The interpretation of these ecstatic experiences often derives from inherit culture, and while the physical experience remains, the interpretation varies accordingly.
The project is a response to the 2019 D&AD Monotype brief which involves celebrating unconventional communities with a typographically-led campaign. Resulting from extensive visual research, my solution was to create a printed publication and supporting video piece which uses a juxtaposition of visual references to highlight the link between techno and spiritual ecstasy, therefore suggesting that techno has more spiritual value that it is given credit for. The imagery refers to both Caravaggio’s depictions of religious ecstasy and to the hands of people at a rave. The coloured sheets behave like stain glass windows. The large typographic bars are taken from the modular structure of techno music percussion and loosely spell out the word ‘ecstasy’. The patterns of text represent percussion and increase in complexity, eventually transcending into chaos. All of the elements combine to create an ambiguous, cinematic experience of ecstasy.
Techno music culture is more than just a platform for drug use. It is a ritual to perform, an escape from the realities of urban life and an embrace of technologized pleasure. For many the experience is even spiritual, with participants feeling ‘close to God’ in the grips of bass-drum induced ecstasy. The project celebrates techno music culture by highlighting the spiritual value it offers to young people on the fringes of conventional society. Religious and techno rituals have numerous similarities and the desired destination of both is to reach ecstasy. The interpretation of these ecstatic experiences often derives from inherit culture, and while the physical experience remains, the interpretation varies accordingly.
The project is a response to the 2019 D&AD Monotype brief which involves celebrating unconventional communities with a typographically-led campaign. Resulting from extensive visual research, my solution was to create a printed publication and supporting video piece which uses a juxtaposition of visual references to highlight the link between techno and spiritual ecstasy, therefore suggesting that techno has more spiritual value that it is given credit for. The imagery refers to both Caravaggio’s depictions of religious ecstasy and to the hands of people at a rave. The coloured sheets behave like stain glass windows. The large typographic bars are taken from the modular structure of techno music percussion and loosely spell out the word ‘ecstasy’. The patterns of text represent percussion and increase in complexity, eventually transcending into chaos. All of the elements combine to create an ambiguous, cinematic experience of ecstasy.