Downtown, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
The Pleasure Principle
FaragoLucy Chinen, Matt Doyle and Yuehao Jiang, Yoshua Okon, Ada Sokol, Ryan Trecartin, Whitney Vangrin Curated by Courtney Malick In our “online culture” the internet provides the framework within which our most intimate conversations, thoughts and observations unfold and yet we accept that in order to indulge in this streamlined lifestyle we relinquish our privacy. In so doing, we supply large quantities of logistical, emotional, and psychological information to corporate entities that exist online via the same capacities as individuals. Our dependence on digital free-roaming has propelled a palpable shift from our previous service-economy to an information-turned-attention-economy, where clickbait dominates markets and e-commerce. Concurrently, the dissipation of certain divisions between cultural, economic, scientific, political and aesthetic fields are dissolving and being replaced by new modes of cross-breeding for capital. Such hybridization promotes the strategic blending of previously unrelated industries turned reciprocative bedfellows, such as the little known but fast burgeoning field of neuromarketing, which brings neurological research and findings to branding and advertising in order to hone powerful, preemptive marketing strategies. Neurological data reveals how desires are formed, triggered, fueled and how the mind is drawn to certain combinations of imagery and language in relation to the brain’s pleasure center. This information is utilized to optimally predetermine the thought patterns of consumers with an almost psychic acuity. Newly designed, hyper-intelligent systems like neuromarketing clearly lead to a marketplace that more so than ever before, promotes certain channels over others. It is through such channels that we access goods and services, and, whether intentionally or not, buy into the larger concepts to which they are tied. In an economy influenced by neuromarketing, products will appear to be specifically tailored to individuals, but will in fact create only the illusion of autonomous choices and decision-making. The Pleasure Principle takes the retail context of the busy area of DTLA and the façade of Farago, with its three adjacent storefront spaces whose exteriors are made up entirely of transparent glass – the antithesis of the insulated white cube -- as an integral component of its project. Often excluding viewers from entering the exhibition space, Farago’s physical structure forces works to be accessed through its large shopping-like windows. Making use of the adjacent city newspaper dispensers, The Pleasure Principle presents and distributes, “Comfort Zone,” a research-based text on neuromarketing by Ada Sokol that serves as the exhibition’s conceptual backbone. The exhibition presents works that focus on the interiors and exteriors of fast food with a video installation by Yoshua Okon; cognitive capitalism and new experiments with the effects of nootropics on both animal and human behavior, with a tablet presentation and window display installation by Lucy Chinen; the ways that corporate brands can be grafted onto individual identities, with digital prints by Ryan Trecartin; the distortion and manipulation of advertising inherent to the labyrinthine nature of the internet and its overlaps with television, with a sound installation by Matt Doyle in collaboration with Yuehao Jiang; and discrepancies between public-facing, airbrushed representations of the female body and the inward-facing realities of aging, with plushy and delicate sculptures recalling Alina Szapocznikow, by Whitney Vangrin.