PURECALYPTUS
Sreaming drinks on and off-line
Purecalyptus is a speculative research & design collective that creates gastrointestinal science fiction objects and narratives. These are primarily real or fictional cocktails that are administered in a futuristic health bar as part of improvised coaching sessions. The cocktails contain substances with which consumers can hack and enhance their moods and physical condition. These are, for example, nutritional supplements, superfoods, essential essences or fitness boosters. Following Lyotard (Libidinous Economy, 1974) and Derrida (Plato's Pharmacy, 1968), our practice can be understood as libidinous pharmacology. The pharmakon, oscillating between remedy and poison, has served from antiquity to the present as a cipher for man's relationship to technology. According to Paul B. Preciado (Testo Junkie, 2013), it is the so-called soft technologies - pill, gas or gel-like technologies that dissolve in or on the body and become indistinguishable from it - that are paradigmatic of a new type of power through which fertility, health and sexuality are regulated and which characterises our present. Purecalyptus takes up this thematic complex, makes it tangible and searches for strategies of subversion and re-appropriation. In doing so, Purecalyptus adopts an aesthetic stance that takes leave of notions of the inwardness of the subject and the depth of nature. The cocktails combine intoxication and self-optimisation, phenomena of dissolution with those of enhancement, playing with hopes of purification and dangers of intoxication.
Purecalyptus is a project run by two Berlin-based speculative fiction consultants with a strong interest in the entanglement of health, art and entrepreneurship. Purecalyptus was founded in 2018 by Alma Sammel and Niklas Egberts in Berlin.
Their aim is to explore how bodies are shaped and constituted through the consumption of commercial goods from the fields of beauty, health, fitness and the self-improvement. How does this specific kind of control work - does it empower or enslave us? What does it feel like to be in between?
In our current time we are faced with an increasing demand on our psychological and physiological stability. The wide field of digital technologies change our patterns of sleep, attention and emotional availability. This influences the way we take care of others, ourselves and the environment in many ways. The neoliberalization of work individualizes responsibility for performance and creates a permanent urge to improve oneself. Depression and Burn-Out are contemporary phenomena just like the boom of fitness through all ages and genders.
The 21st century is marked by an incomparable advance in biotechnologies. Biochemical warfare, the medicalization of the human body and the use of genetically modified crops have influenced nature in such a way that our conception of it has to be modified. There is no nature without culture anymore, just like there is no culture without nature.
The medicalization of the human body in the 21st century can be summarised as a paradigm change from a descriptive to an experimental science (Nelly Oudshoorn — Beyond the Natural Body). Desire, gender, fitness and mental health are functions of the bodily substances to which they are attached. Following the argument of P. B. Preciado (Testo Junkie), it is this field of soft technologies that represents the dominant form of post-biopolitical power.
Their aim is to investigate this field.
