LIFE SUPPORT



“The machine wants you alive tomorrow.

The room wants you alive right now.”


Concerts are places where people lose themselves.


Music overwhelms thought.


Identity dissolves into movement, sweat, rhythm, and noise.


The body disappears.


But what happens when the body refuses to disappear?


Participants enter what appears to be an ordinary concert.


Bodies collide.


Voices give way to screams.


The room sits at the threshold between celebration and collision.


Euphoria and exhaustion.


Pleasure and risk.


Upon entry, each participant is assigned a number and fitted with a heart rate monitor.


Participation is limited to 200 people.


Names are never used.


The audience enters as a crowd.


The system sees a collection of measurable bodies.


Large screens throughout the venue render information gathered from the room into movement.


Numbers rise and fall across the screens.


Pulse.


Spike.


Collapse.


Recover.


The projections resemble audio visualizations, seismic activity, weather systems, or crowds viewed from above.


Yet they are none of these.


They are the physiological traces of the room itself.


Beats per minute.


Heart rate spikes.


Collective exertion.


The crowd gradually reveals itself as a living organism.


A sea of measurements.


A sea of people.


One animal composed of two hundred nervous systems.


As heart rates rise, the projections become increasingly animated.


The room watches itself becoming more alive.


And closer to the edge.


The visualizations escalate.


The crowd escalates.


The music escalates.


The numbers escalate.


Each system feeding the next.


At irregular intervals, the system intervenes.


The music does not stop.


A robotic voice cuts through the sound.


PARTICIPANT 076.


EXERTION LEVEL EXCEEDS RECOMMENDED LIMITS.


The music continues.


Later:


PARTICIPANT 142.


OVERHEATING. REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE CROWD.


Then:


PARTICIPANT 188.


REDUCE EXERTION.


Then:


PARTICIPANT 034.


RECOVERY ADVISED.


Then:


PARTICIPANT 119.


BREATHE.


The interventions continue throughout the night as the room is inhabited by living oblivion.


The participant enters the room seeking intensity.


The system exists to reduce risk.


The participant seeks euphoria.


The machine seeks stability.


The participant seeks surrender.


The machine attempts to intervene.


Both the participant and the machine are pursuing life.


The machine understands life as preservation.


The participant understands life as experience.


Hydrate.


Recover.


Monitor.


Breathe.


Instructions designed to preserve life begin to interrupt the experience of living it.


The machine says:


Reduce exertion.


The room says:


JUMP HIGHER.


The machine says:


Slow down.


The room says:


MOVE FASTER.


The machine says:


Recover. 


The room screams:


LOSE YOURSELF.


At what point does care become interference?


At what point does preservation become restraint?


What happens when the pursuit of safety collides with the pursuit of intensity?


What happens when the machine follows the body into ecstasy?


LIFE SUPPORT is about the conflict between the body's need to survive and the human desire to feel fully alive.


After the performance, participants are asked a single question:


What was worth it?


The system stores three things:


Peak heart rate.


Age.


Answer.


The archive grows with each performance.


A collection of moments in which people chose intensity over preservation.


A database of exertion.


Of resistance.


Of meaning.


Years later, the system contains thousands of responses.


Different cities.


Different bodies.


Different lives.


The same question.


What was worth it?




Visual and sonic references: 

T.S.O.L., Fugazi, Refused, Korn, System of a Down, and Limp Bizkit.