_What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe. (Jacques Lacan)_

This project is a transcription for mechanical piano of a lecture by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The audience's response in the lecture is played by a guitar amplifier. The video of the lecture is screened with a video projector. 

During the lecture where Lacan talks about the language as a foundation for our understanding of our surroundings, he is abruptly disrupted by a student who ruins his lecture notes with flour and water: This is part II of the piece: a protest against society. The student is a situationist, inspired by Debord. They start discussing before he ruins Lacan's tie and is thrown out of the lecture hall. Lacan then starts lecturing about the protesters views about people and society, about revolution and love. 

In the art discourse, both Lacan and Debord are central, this is a meeting of their views upon society. This lecture took place in 1971. The happening is highly coloured by the context, the student protests in France in the late sixties, and revolution as an frequent used word in discussion. 
The choice of the piano is intended to both be a critique and a hommage to Lacan and postmodern thinkers like him as they first started with theories that revolutionized and transformed how we experience our world, and ended up as virtuous theoretical performers.

Links: http://bjornerikhaugen.com/Websted/What_does_it_matter_how_many_lovers_you_have_if_none_of_them_gives_you_the_universe.html

Bjørn Erik Haugen (NO), MA from the National Academy in Oslo 2007. He works mainly with compositions, sound- and videoinstallation. He works from a conceptual platform where the idea to the work comes before the material, media or way of expression. He makes political works which have been shown on the annual national autumn exhibition in Norway, and have been screened in Vienna, Barcelona, Sweden, Germany, England and in the US.