In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation would be a nightclub, full of people, pumping music, lights, smoke machine and maybe drugs thrown in. You could call it Nightclub, and if you kept it going 24 hours a day it would be the big hit of the Biennale.’ How right he was. For what else is Berghain — the world’s most famous techno club — if not a wild work of immersive art?
Berghain is housed in the ruin of a Soviet thermal power station in Berlin. Conceived on a grand scale, it’s a fathomless black box you enter into for 12 or so hours to be pummelled by every sort of sensation, before stumbling out again, not quite sure what happened. As immersive art goes, from Tino Sehgal to IMAX, there really isn’t much to compete with it.
What else is Berghain – the world’s most famous techno club – if not a wild work of immersive art?
Berghain’s founders cut their teeth organising hardcore gay fetish nights.
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