HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE

Happiness, Free, for Everyone, 2014. Installation includes Cloud (17'x10') and Breathe on It, Hardware cloth, cotton-polyester fiber filling, LED lights, plywood, acrylic paint, flexible piping, metal funnel, PIR sensors, arduino microcontroller, and video projection.

Happiness explores issues of control, artifice, and intersections of science fiction and science fact. Christopher Turner’s biography of Wilhelm Reich, Adventures in the Orgasmatron, provides source material for this ongoing multipart installation and video project. The title owes its name to the concluding line in the Strugatsky brother’s sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic. The collision of ideas originating from these two texts provides the conceptual basis for my interpretation of what the cloud once was—something to be controlled (by the human, Reich, specifically)—and what it is now—a collecting device for human data (to be watched by outside forces or the alien within us).