Critical Mass: Pure Immanence, solo show by Anne de Vries on a proposal by It's Our Playground.

Anne de Vries’ video probes the emotionally charged esotericism of huge electronic dance music events in particular those dedicated to the genre known as Hardstyle. Evolving from a subculture of electronic music in the 1970s, whose tracks were aimed to empower and unite its small (often queer) and alternative communities, today this form of electronic dance events has evolved into spectacularly staged, mass culture productions mounted by promotional companies such as Q-dance. In the film swarms of tens of thousands of bodies in concert locations are filmed with the zoom-in and zoom-out of a sporting event cam. A text inspired by the essay “Pure Immanence” by Gilles Deleuze runs throughout the film as a voice-over exploring the philosophical dimension of crowd-based experience. The film is a hypnotic, unsettling articulation of altered state of consciousness as generated by sound and visual effects, the celebration of the synthetic, and the convergence of current tendencies in philosophy and entertainment culture.