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What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe This project is a transcription for mechanical piano of a lecture by the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan. The audience`s response in the lecture is played by a guitar amplifier. The video of the lecture will be screened with a video projector. Lecture The Lecture where he talks about the language as a foundation for our understanding of our surroundings. He is abruptly disrupted by a student that ruins his lecture notes with flour and water, that is the part II of the piece, as a protest against society. He is a situationist, inspired by Debord they start discussing before he ruins Lacan`s cravat/tie and is thrown out of the lecture hall. Lacan then starts lecturing about the protesters views about people and society, about revolution and love. Thoughts about the project In art discourse both Lacan and Debord are central, this is a meeting of their views upon society. This lecture hel place in 1971. The happening is highly coloured by the context, the student protests in France in the late sixties, and revolution as an frequent used word in discussion. The choice of the piano is intended to both be a critique and a hommage to Lacan and postmodern thinkers like him as they first started with theories that revolutionized and transformed how we experience our world, and ended up as virtuous theoretical performers. The audience knew exactly what they were getting when they entered their lectures. The title is a famous quote by Lacan. Here it refers to the two «ideologies» in the piece, the situationist and the psychoanalytic. What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe received Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2012 in the section Digital Musics & Sound Art.

My name is Bjørn Erik Haugen, and I have an MA from the National Academy in Oslo 2007. I work mainly with compositions, sound- and video installation. I work from a conceptual platform where the idea to the work comes before the material, media or way of expression. Art Practice My works has been shown on the annual national autumn exhibition in Norway, and have been screened in Wienna, Barcelona, Sweden, Germany, England and in USA. I exibited at Transmediale, Berlin, February this year.