Send Mark to Coventry

An exhibition at the UK City of Culture festival in Coventry has this month been offering attendees the chance to see the city through the eyes of one of its late-1980s clubbers, via the transcendent power of virtual reality.

In pursuit of repetitive beats was created by visual artist Darren Emerson, who aims to deliver its audience a multi-sensory experience that recreates the nascent days of the wob.

“Everyone I interviewed for this was raving in those early days of ’89 and every one of them talked about the adventure,” he said. 

“Even if they didn’t find the party, it was about getting out there. Driving two or three hours up and down the motorway. Organisers would avoid the police by having meeting points so you wouldn’t know until the last minute. You could be going up the M1 to find out you’d need to go back to London as the party was there.”

It’s the first time we’ve fully understood the true purpose of this technology: to seize the means of production from Mark Zuckerberg and watch him struggle to keep pace with young people for the purposes of Meta’s promotional material, upping the ante from listening to Billie Eilish to maneuvering his body to Orbital while swigging bottles of water at illegal raves.

We want to see this catching on to the point of cultural commentators of the future giving school lectures on Coventry’s role in subverting Meta’s twee interpretation of human desire –namely playing cards in space as a robot – much like it turned Pete Waterman’s grasp of the music industry on its head when he paid a visit to The Eclipse back in 1992.