GegenHyperreal — GEGEN BERLIN

When your streaming service has a better idea of what you want to watch next than you have... When you try to somehow reproduce the image you created of yourself on social media each and every day... When you are paying money to get back a body you never had... When the "realistically" shaped sex toy feels more intense than any human... When this hot person you are chatting with on a dating site seems to be a bot… then you have finally arrived in hyperreality.

In the hyperreality, nothing is false nor true. It is a beautiful apparatus that was created to "remember" the fiction of something real that never existed. Hence, hyperreality protects us from the consensus reality of the previous generations, which has been banned here. Influencers create identities and tell stories, inviting countless people to become part of these realities. They are not sharing news. They are making news. The hyperreality created on social media platforms is so powerful that their content and emotions are translated into physical reality.

But there are dangers to this: People can view and accept hyperreal images as models for their own reality, even though the images do not necessarily represent real people. Our own bodies are actually left behind only in the non-mediatized niches of the invisible. With these bodies, however, one does not gain access to the virtual worlds of the metaverses of the large media corporations. In their hyperrealities, the under- and overwhelming game of confusion rules. It is no longer clear exactly which fakes are supposed to be real. AI accounts act as individual personalities with artificial social circles and self-programming preferences and consequently impact trends and the process of political opinion formation.

But the entertainment industry disguises the fake because revealing it could lead to a loss of trust. True, hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to recognize reality. Nevertheless, the implosion of the medium and the real need not lead to a total loss of control (all right, sometimes losing control is exactly what we want). Let's consciously enter the hyperreal nebula and let us consciously desire the total fake and make its creation visible. It's about actively crafting a false reality that's meant to be consumed as real. It is a GEGEN space. Let's turn the dance floor into a perversion of reality and into a space that knowingly includes parts of our consensus reality while going far beyond it. An otherworldly reality in which gender and body norms are left behind and that at the same time shows traces of imperfection and vulnerability. Let's build our own collective hyperreality.

GEGEN HYPERREAL

concept courtesy of Mirko Winkel
photo courtesy of Florian Hetz
graphics & logo by Enrico Bardin

video teaser by Wiebo
w/. Kasia Jamroz & Ini Incisive