How Do Common Feelings Take Place on the Dance Floor?
How Do Common Feelings Take Place on the Dance Floor?
The historical experience of disco and rave cultures amounts to a massive experiment in organizing bodies and sounds in motion, and a reinvention of liveness beyond any binary opposition to technology. Sometimes, the dance floor brings forward a collectivity that can be understood as a commons; if only a very temporary one. Today it is clear that not all participatory cultures or acts of radical self-expression are similarly emancipatory. Yet the celebratory practices of the dance floor have the ability to express collective desires and concepts impossible to formulate in traditional politics. Against this background, this workshop asks: What are the conditions that allow the dancefloor to become a commons? Who takes on responsibility? What emotions are explored? How can software and hardware bring us together, rather than enforcing a musical monologue? A transdisciplinary group, consisting of a DJ, an art critic, a physicist, and a historian, will present and discuss with participants their experiences and theories regarding acoustics, aesthetics, and of the structure of feeling.