{"id":394,"date":"2019-05-13T18:31:49","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T18:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aerial.fm\/?p=394"},"modified":"2019-09-18T17:15:36","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T17:15:36","slug":"punters-at-solent-showcase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/?p=394","title":{"rendered":"Punters at Solent Showcase"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Punters: autoportraits of fairground thrill<\/a> features as part of the group show Everything is Now<\/em>, at Solent Showcase<\/a> from 26 April – 11 June 2019 – in collaboration with artist and writer, Stacey Heale. Other featured artists include Candy Chang, Greg Gilbert, Stacey Heale, The Fandangoe Kid, Life.Death.Whatever. For those who can’t attend, I wrote some text for the show, which I’d like to share with you here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fifteen years ago, I started to interview people about their own personal thrilling experience<\/a> \u2013 this included a broad range of experiences, from a cross dresser taking their first walk in public, to a teenager surviving a fall through the ice. Borrowing techniques from ethno-criminology I broke these interviews down, hoping to discover the precise moment of transformative thrill. I wanted to understand what motivated people through a sequence of events \u2013 events which they often constructed themselves – towards and through that thrilling moment. To some viewers, such a sequence of events can appear to be psychologically traumatic, horrific and often incomprehensible. To others they can appear hugely exciting and alluring. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My own motivation as an artist and designer was to learn how I\nmight engineer new thrilling experiences, not only for participants, but also for\nspectators who might witness and experience these transformations vicariously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One comment was common to many of my interviews, regardless of the\ncontext: \u201cI never felt so alive\u201d. To be thrilled is to feel alive. There is a\nphysiological transformation as the body\u2019s autonomic system is activated, and adrenaline\nflows through the veins to excite biological systems. This flow is accompanied\nby a burst of dopamine to the brain and a euphoric high. Emotional states are\nchemically transformed. Forty-three muscles in the face contort to express\nthese emotional transformations, which other humans – and animals – are\nprogrammed to recognise and respond to. Thrill has evolved as a most basic\nanimal mechanism to reward the persistence not only of ourselves, but also of our\ntroop, and ultimately our species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, in the\nwestern world, many of our basic animal needs are met. There is little danger\nto evade; we can pick up a loaf of bread from the shop; we can drink water from\na tap; we can find sex on Tinder. Yet the very mechanisms put in place to keep\nus alive, can also make us feel dead. To fill this void, individuals learn,\nadapt and hone thrill seeking behaviour. We are all thrill engineers, but each\nindividual is different. Proclivities, philias, phobias, and attitudes towards\nrisk and fear are deeply subjective. The sensation of thrill my grandma got\nfrom opening a surprise birthday present appeared to be just as rewarding to\nher as the thrill an adrenaline junkie might get from sky diving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The phenomenon of\nthe thrill ride<\/em> fascinates me in\nparticular. Some chimpanzee troops have learned to fell trees, which they ride\nto the ground for pleasure. The same sticky, sweaty pores on the palms of their\nhands and feet, which \u2013 when activated by thrill – helped them to swing from\ndanger, chase prey, or hold a mate, also allows them to hang on to their perfectly\nengineered thrill ride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Humans are no different. Hand-in-hand with the evolution of safe\nurban living has come the evolution of amusement parks and rides. These\nsprawling engineering complexes house collections of machines whose efficiency\ncan be measured in terms of the magnitude and frequency of transformative\nexperiences that they can deliver to the wide variety of humans that they\nprocess along their winding production lines. My video Ride Virgin<\/em> (2007) shows one of these machines \u2013 Oblivion \u2013 in\noperation in one of these complexes \u2013 Alton Towers \u2013processing one human.  Alton Towers will deliver 1\/4 billion thrilling\nmoments this year alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the series Punters:\nauto-portraits of fairground thrill <\/em>(2006) I present snapshots of\nindividual emotional experience in flux. My portrait machine monitors the sweat\nresponse of riders as they hang onto their ride. The shutter and flash of an\nanalogue film camera are triggered at the peak moment of rider-arousal. By\ncreating this machine, I had hoped to capture the precise moment of transformation.\nI feel that I failed, yet the array of emotions my riders communicate to the\nviewer, who are now voyeurs of this private moment, has made me appreciate the\ncomplexity and deeply subjective nature of thrill, and its relationship to trauma,\nand other darker emotional states. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I continue to hunt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Punters: autoportraits of fairground thrill features as part of the group show Everything is Now, at Solent Showcase from 26 April – 11 June 2019 – in collaboration with artist and writer, Stacey Heale. Other featured artists include Candy Chang, Greg Gilbert, Stacey Heale, The Fandangoe Kid, Life.Death.Whatever. For those who can’t attend, I wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":400,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"item_id":"","pf_source_link":"","item_date":"","item_author":"","item_link":"","item_feat_img":"","item_wp_date":"","item_tags":"","source_publication_name":"","source_publication_url":"","nomination_count":"","sortable_item_date":"","pf_word_count":"","pf_forward_to_origin":"no-forward","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/BrendanSolent-1.jpg","nominators":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NHBn-6m","distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"aerial","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/aerial.fm","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408,"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/408"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"attributes":{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true},"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=394"},{"attributes":{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true},"href":"https:\/\/aerial.fm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}