About this Project

As gift exchange is an erotic commerce, joining self and other, so the gifted state is an erotic state: in it we are sensible of, and participate in, the underlying unity of things.
     - Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

The Erotic Economies Research Group (EERG) is a research collaboration in the media and visual arts that explores systems of reciprocity in variously scaled social interactions. The premise of EERG is that most or all mannered social interactions participate in a larger erotic economy; that is, the “presentation of self” (Goffman) is a gift system in which the receiver of the gift does not merely acquire a greeting, an object, or an idea, but a part of the giver as well. In this way, the gift has a transcendental quality, which mimetically binds the parties in a reciprocal economy.

The overarching goal of the EERG is to initiate and support new and sustained interdisciplinary, intercommunity and international collaborations, through various complementary methodologies -- mainly the digital and physical production, exhibition, and archiving of visual and media art pieces, as well as critical texts that examine issues of exchange economies.

The almost bewildering array of possibilities for investigation include models in sociology, economics, political theory, linguistics, systems theory, and so forth. We do not close this list by adopting “erotics” (following Hyde) as a paradigmatic anchor, but we do feel that the analysis of giving and receiving must play a central role in our work. We are then committed to motion in several directions at once, most simply put: toward critical discourse and toward visual and media art works.

The EERG confirms and extends a cultural “turn” that emerged in the 1990s as a tremendous expansion of collaborative and interactive activity in independent and experimental media, the modulation of “institutional critique” in the arts into “relational aesthetics”, and of course a vast expansion of interactivity in digital media and critical collaboration on the Web (where the systemics of “giving” has assumed a mercurial and paradoxical elusiveness).

Through these social research topics and methods of inquiry and production, the EERG will create a dialogue between various people, places and pieces that reproduce, investigate and/or represent an assortment of economies, both in existence or otherwise, outside of a traditional commodity exchange, and which create interpersonal bonds that may be regarded as participating in erotic economies.