EMANCIPATION KIT

– a set of emetic tools and pharmaceuticals, specially designed for the elegant ritual of the eviction of the contents of the stomach –

We live in the age of enlightenment that is lightening and lighting up our heavy bodies. Thanks to our eyeballs and an enormous variety of its technical supplements, from spectacles to out-of-human-sight-spectrum imaging technologies, today we can perceive our world without a single move of muscles (except that of the eyes). No drop of sweat but gaze is required for getting around, whether watching a mundane car’s road movie while commuting spaces or more exotic Martian rover’s broadcastings. Distance is no longer measured in steps but in light-years, that is, the time light reaches the retina. Living world becomes a gravity-free spectacle, and the body does nothing but sees and is seen.

Unfortunately, the body does not get lighter, let alone its disappearance, but the opposite happens: it becomes even heavier and more noticeable. As an example, ‘couch potatoes’ and anorexics, both victims of the age of lightenment, tend to gain extra weight – for the former in a fleshy or rather fatty form, and for the latter in a psychological manner. Following this trend, both get imprisoned in their bodies, especially when it comes to dealing with gravity-driven environment.

For those enlightened, still believing in the possibility of dissolving the body into the weightless photons, the ritual of vomiting, both symbolically and physiologically, might help to achieve this dream. Some are already practicing it, people like anorexics and bulimics, celebrating the abandonment of the body.

“Emancipation Kit,” a specially designed set of tools to facilitate the act of vomiting, makes this dream even lighter. It does not merely facilitate the act of vomiting; this equipment turns the ritual into the experiential and elegant spectacle. Therefore even those ‘unlightened’ may be lightly familiarised with one of the most celebrated rituals of disembodiment. Thus turning the emancipation kit into a bodily simulator of the disaster of the flesh.

Concept No2

Fairground has always been a synthetic surrogate to reality, offering a more immersive and pleasurable spectacle of an alternative universe. It has always been a place where recent technology, fantasy and pleasure fuse together, mimicking a modern vision of utopian happyland – a happyland that disorients, and makes us vomit.

It’s hardly surprising that nausea or vomiting is an intrinsic experience of amusement park since disorientation there is a fundamental strategy for amusing or distracting visitors. The fairground phenomenon of disorientation is not merely a condition of 'suspending disbelief', but it is unique in its ability to invade the visitor’s whole body, literally and metaphorically. Fluttering innards, white-knuckle frisson, motion sickness, the spectacle, and hyperreality are only a few concepts illustrating the fairground’s power to produce fiction engaging human in its the very essence.

What is surprising is that these so-called 'side effects' of the fairground, such as vomiting, are trivialised and marginalised, or even disguised aesthetically. Since there are no such feelings of fairground’s 'intoxication', visitors are totally disoriented and are no longer aware of the border between fictional and real world. Even more striking, amusement park is no longer that fenced place with carousels and shows inside. Today, amusement rides are designed by everyone: from advertisement designers to politicians and semiologists. Thus it is worth to pose a question what amusement ride are you riding now?

Fortunately, The Personal Emancipation Kit may help you to escape the state of the intoxication. The kit is a set of emetic tools and pharmaceuticals, specially designed for elegant ritual of direct and symbolic liberation or disengagement from the state of the disorientation produced by the 'global amusement park'.