Genda Fluid

In the imagination of the past 40 years, the primary setting for the embodiment of futurological projections has been a shimmering neo-noir East Asian megalopolis. Science fiction, and specifically cyber-punk, has been the conduit for this aesthetic since the 1980s, lighting up the already cinematic backstreets of Tokyo and Hong Kong with neon.

The new work by Genda Fluid could easily be a street in the type of city that we know from Bladerunner (1982) or Akira (1988). Performing, in the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky, “a nocturne on a drainpipe flute,” Genda Fluid has created a spatial poem about unearthly pleasures, assembled from neon and LED signs.

Her “mental spa corner” within the exhibition invites us to meditate on the experience economy and speculate about who could become a consumer of these new services. Who are these ethereal pleasures created for? Surely not for the protagonists of Brandon Cronenberg’s turbo-consumerist dystopia Antiviral (2012), who buy celebrities’ viruses to get up close to their idols through illness. It’s more likely that the artist has invented these wellness treatments for the captive computer programs from the science fiction film Tron (1982), which was an important reference point for the design of the exhibition.