“Constraint City / the pain of everyday life” is a critical performance in urban environments, addressing public and private space within the realm of everyday constraints. It resembles an interface for an invisible city; an architecture that is subconsciously perceived. A chest strap (corset) with high-torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as a fetish object. The motors tighten the straps when an enclosed wireless network is detected: the better the WIFI signal is, the tighter the jacket becomes. Closed network points improve the pleasurable play of tight lacing the performer‘s bustier. Thus, constituting the ether as a space of possible pregnancy, filled with potential access-points to networks of communication. This technique, also called Inverse War-Driving, challenges the much over-hyped discourse about locative and wearable media. Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a static schizogeographic painmap which data is acquired from “GoogleMaps” servers with automated script bots. By wearing the straitjacket, the artist not only writes, but is at once also able to read the city code. Hence, the outcome of his walk provokes the emergence of a city-shaped body formed by surrounding electromagnetic waves.
The technical necessity of wearing the jacket on the naked chest adds some unexpected dimensions of gender. The object itself presents a new genre, a mixture of a fashion apparatus, technical gadgetry, low-tech DIY object, sex toy and a sarcastic wearable media device, all linked by their relation to the architecture of cities and networks and politics of everyday life.
The project evokes a wide range of emotional and intellectual questions considering the “freedoms” of everyday life. As a critical performance in urban space, it cleverly combines the Situationists’ technique of city exploration (dérive) with contemporary network structures, toy gadgetry, fetishism, locative and wearable media. It has been performed in different cities and gained publicity not only within the field of new media.

Links: http://pain.yugo.at

Gordan Savicic (AT/NL) is a performing artist and an independent electronic practitioner based in Vienna and Rotterdam. His artistic work involves weird machines, game cultures and digital performances. Together with ZugZwangZukunft, he has exhibited various arcade-machine game modifications international and participated on the legendary Bluetooth-Rock’n’Roll world tour with “the handydandy”. Gordan Savicic is a socialite of the Ludic Society, with whom he co-developed game fashion and new bachelor machines in 2006/2007. His installations and participation in collaborative projects have been shown and performed in IRCAM (Paris), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Walcheturm (Zürich) and Transmediale (Berlin), among others.