This two-year artistic research project investigates electricity as a medium through which scientific knowledge and metaphysical imagination become entangled. The project examines how electrical medical technologies, particularly electrotherapy within (alternative) medicine and psychiatry, operate not only as technical instruments, but as ideological systems that shape ideas of healing, optimization, and control.
Joppe Venema approaches electricity as a cultural and political force that organizes promises of connection and transformation within broader logics of extraction, regulation, and technological mediation. Starting from experiments with high-voltage photography and electrotherapeutic principles, the project explores how electrical infrastructures produce specific experiences, atmospheres, and understandings of the human body and mental health.
The research project combines media archaeology, artistic experimentation, dialogues with artists, therapists, psychiatrists, and scientists, and visits to alternative therapeutic practices. Rather than evaluating these technologies scientifically, the project investigates how they generate belief, affect, and cultural meaning, and how they normalize particular models of subjectivity, care, and human experience.
The project will result in sculptural installations, photographic and audiovisual experiments, a video essay, lectures, exhibitions, and a publication.
(Photo taken during a multi wave oscillator therapy session)
