Happiness (2019) Studio Dries Verhoeven (Commissioned)
Graphic Design for Happiness by studio Dries Verhoeven.
On the street is a small concrete cubicle, a cross between a public toilet and a pharmacy. This illicit store is manned by a humanoid, a human-looking robot. She talks to us about different drugs, painkillers and antidepressants we can use to tweak our emotional reality by re-jigging the serotonin and dopamine levels in our brain.In the combination of robotics and drugs, the work explores the zone where the human and the artificial merge; where, aided by synthetic substances we can rehumanise or become more than human. Or escape our human state entirely, for a while.
Happiness is co-commissioned by SPRING Festival Utrecht (NL) and NDSM-werf foundation (NL)
Photography Willem Popelier, Thorsten Alofs
Production; Studio Dries Verhoeven www.driesverhoeven.com