The Economy of Bliss: Pleasure as Currency
GlogauAIR, Berlin, Germany

The Economy of Bliss: Pleasure as Currency examines pleasure as a regulated and transactional system within a digital economy structured around erotic exchange.

The performance takes place over five consecutive days, operating 24 hours a day. The body remains live on the streaming platform Chaturbate, where nothing occurs unless it is requested and paid for by a viewer.

Within this system, erotic pleasure is removed. What is available instead is a different register of pleasure, defined and controlled by the artist. Viewers are offered a menu of actions that can be purchased, including eating a piece of chocolate, spending time coloring in a book, or reading a poem by Audre Lorde.

The audience becomes part of the system. Viewers observe, request, and financially direct the conditions of the performance. Action is contingent on their participation, yet the expected outcome is consistently interrupted.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the panopticon, the digital gaze operates as a structuring force. Visibility is constant. The body is watched, directed, and shaped through external demand.

Control does not sit in one place. It moves between viewer, platform, and performer. Responsibility disperses.

The work considers where agency exists when desire is collectively produced but redirected.  What happens when pleasure remains present, but is redefined? Who is in control?

Photography by Giulia GR.