SENSES: No Romance.
On February 15th 2025 Senses hosted our 2nd exhibition No Romance. Valentines day weekend 2025 embraced the cold of the winter, the fires of passion and an artistic dissection of love. Our resident artists explored the forces—both primal and modern—that shape human connection.
This edition marked the first Research & Development night from Over Rhythm and Studio Ende. While Senses 2024 was a large-scale event at Islington Mill, No Romance took a more intimate approach, focusing on a single sensory theme—love and passion. Hosted at YES Manchester, the night featured a carefully curated selection of artists, each responding to the complexities of desire in the digital age.
Is love simply Chemicals and Hormones?
Scientists reduce our passions to a few key chemical transmitters: dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin. While oxytocin and serotonin are associated with comfort and well-being, dopamine significantly shapes our passion-driven behaviors. A surge in dopamine intensifies cravings, pleasure, and fixation, whether it's for a person, a drug, or even our phone screens.
It might seem odd to consider phone screens alongside more tangible desires like those for a partner or lover. However, the digital landscape we inhabit has been profoundly shaped by 'dopamine hijacking,' a technique designed to exploit this neurochemical response. This ‘dopamine hijacking’ is a commonplace practice of the technological landscape we find ourself in.
For example, app and UX designers will incorporate Variable Rewards (The Slot Machine Effect) Social media feeds, notifications, and likes work like a slot machine. You don’t know when you’ll get something exciting, so you keep checking. This randomness triggers dopamine release, making the behaviour compulsive. Research indicates that dopamine levels fluctuate most significantly in situations where the outcome is uncertain, such as gambling or playing the lottery. This suggests that the brain's reward system is particularly sensitive to unpredictable rewards, which may drive individuals to engage in behaviours with uncertain outcomes.
It’s strange how every app looks like the same and incorporates the same features? Scrolling down, liking and getting notifications - this hasn’t happened naturally, its designed to keep you in love with your device, in love with a website or dating app. In a sense, your ‘love’ for things has been corrupted by the modern forces that shape media, technology and communication.
Is your sense of desire really your own?
Manipulating your sense of love with technology isn’t new. Marketing and media professionals have been using high release dopamine techniques to get customers to buy things for a very long time.
But it was only at the start the 20th century that they started doing it with intention, strategy and conspiracy. Take for example, cigarette campaigns in the 1920s.
They featured glamorous women exhaling smoke, often directed toward a male admirer, evoking a seductive, intimate atmosphere. The imagery emphasised flirtation and attraction, reinforcing the link between smoking and desirability. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, was involved in the largest campaigns of the early 21st century from cigarettes, soap, to breakfast meals – from his book Propaganda (1928) his comments on sex in advertising from his influence on the Lucky Strike campaign, where he advised linking smoking to slimness and attractiveness:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Sexuality is one of the strongest forces in human psychology. If you can use it to sell your product, you will.”
Wow, that’s dark. It calls into question whether our desires can ever be trusted, how the relationship between ourself and our bodies are built on manipulated foundations. 100 years later in 2025 we are continually thrown into a psychological war against what we feel and what is real.
No Romance is one thing but let’s take a step back and explore our passions with some more Romanticism…
Is love a force from another world?
Others see love as something that comes not from within but as a sudden force that overcomes reason — in the Homeric cultures such as Rome and Greece, Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, is married to Hephaestus, the god of fire and craftsmanship. However, she secretly takes Ares, the god of war, as her lover. Their relationship embodies a symbolic opposition: Ares represents brutal, uncontrolled force, while Aphrodite embodies attraction and desire.Their union suggests that love and war are not just enemies but also deeply connected forces—both are powerful, both provoke intense emotions, and both disrupt order.
Love isn't always easy. During the winter months where comfort and safety are paramount – what sort of passions do we seek refuge to? In Geothe’s Gefunden for example, Love appears as a fire that keeps the spirit alive through the bleak winter. Goethe believed that winter, with its long nights and quiet landscapes, invites introspection about love and in his infamous book Young Verte he captures love’s transformation into obsession that brings suffering rather than fulfilment.
And so, even in the romantic traditions, it seems love and destruction come side by side. Even today as we navigate our modern landscape, digital connection to others has evolved from a fulfilling technology to one that causes disassociation, over stimulation and dissolution. Much like like fire itself - love can warm you into wonderful ecstasy or burn you completely.
We represented this train of thought through No Romance with a group of audio and visual artists for our R&D...
Senses: No Romance Audio & Visual.
Zolatec.
Producer and steel pannist, Zolatec's transcendent electronic and organic sounds were a perfect touch an experience in the mind body connection of love. A symbol of fulfilment and balance as our headline act. Her use of the island instrument of a long forgotten time a call to the past for a vision of the now. We were thrilled to watch her craft an emotional landscape of love and passion and left Senses completely mesmerised.
Sophia Hararri
Award-winning writer, musician, and poet. Sophia blessed us with a DJ set of soothing electronic dance floor rhythms as the heat began to rise. The acclaimed resident DJ of Crop Radio and Reform Radio brought a connection to the body that gently pushed us further toward something a little more obsessive.
Indigo Jung & Ayrton Hood
Increasing the tessellations—the tepid waters we explored early on broke sharply, and the music moved from Aphrodite’s subtle transfixion to Aries’ obsessive war cry. Back to back the duo released on Sprechen Records, Berlin House Music and Highly Swung with a mirad of techno and electronic releases. Hood traveling from over seas landed on the 15th of February and gave us an unforgettable performance.
Studio Ende built an environment where the lines between human and machine blurred. TV signals jammed and flickered, bodies moved through projected glitches, and light pulsed in time with the rhythm of sweat and sound. Their set design was a reminder that in the digital age, even passion is coded, compressed, and streamed back at us in unpredictable, addictive loops.
Tara Burdett an affiliate of the PLUTO Ecosistema with exhibitions spanning Valencia to Paris, dressed the space in an eerie choreography of the human form. Her body sculptures, twisting and spilling into the space, felt both erotic and unsettling, as if flesh itself was being rewritten.
In a world where screens flatten desire and technology sells it back to us in fragmented, hyperreal forms, Burdett’s work pulled us back into something raw, something primal—where flesh and feeling exist beyond the algorithms of digital life. She frames her work through ‘acceptance’ your body viewed introspectively is warped by perspectives of society, culture and technology. Her installations reminded us that while technology extends our desires into infinite realms, it also threatens to reshape our bodies into something unrecognisable.
And we also had strawberries..
Thank you to everyone who attended Senses: No Romance. This R&D night was an exploration—of love, obsession, the body, and the forces that shape our desires. As winter called for introspection, this project became an experiment in mood, space, and sensation.
We look ahead to the next Senses, where light and warmth will guide us toward something brighter. But for now, we sit with what was uncovered here — passion as both fire and fracture, connection as both intimacy and illusion.
A huge thank you to all the incredible artists who brought this vision to life, and to everyone who engaged with the theme. If you’d like to connect, collaborate, or continue the conversation, we’d love to hear from you.
Until next time….
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