Mario Milizia - Mood Mixer

The second installment of a research begun with Style Mixer in 2003, Mood Mixer is a sort of game, but also an investigative tool: it presents itself as a refined disk in glossy white cardboard with two levels, which allows users to generate over 15,000 different moods by combining seemingly contradictory or irreconcilable emotions, states of mind, and sentiments. Yet from their union are born new and unpredictable feelings and moods, able to define real present phenomena or to evoke possible future conceptual models: 'catatonic satisfaction,' 'compulsive regret,' 'stressful delight' are but a few of the suggestive combinations created by Mood Mixer.

Mario Milizia plays once again with the concept of language hybridization in contemporary culture and aesthetics, just as he had done in 2003, on the occasion of his solo exhibition also at Jousse Entreprise, when-with the same design but in a rigorous black-he presented Style Mixer which, at that time, randomly combined music genres, architecture styles, and art movements, thereby giving rise to combinations that were oftentimes ironic and dissonant, and at others absolutely credible. It's not easy to imagine what a 'Minimal Louis XIV' or a 'Medieval Hip-Hop' could be.

Mood Mixer picks up on and re-elaborates in its design and irony the research of Robert Plutchik, an American psychologist who in 1980 proposed in his Theories of Emotion a classification of eight basic emotions with varying intensity. In establishing a three-dimensional combination model, Plutchik demonstrated that the combinations of these eight basic emotions generate eight other emotions. For example, by joining two sentiments such as 'ecstasy' and 'admiration,' one obtains 'love.' Grateful to the American scholar but not satisfied, Milizia proposes with Mood Mixer more nuances in the field of possible or impossible, experienced or yet-to-experience moods.

Accompanying the presentation of Mood Mixer is a video entitled Jubilant Hallucination (from one of the 15,000 possible combinations) lasting twenty-one minutes.

By using footage and images from a live concert, of which we are not given any information, Milizia composes a video where, with the support of a sound engineer, he rewrites the audio. By editing ten sound tracks by different artists, from Madonna to the Black Eyed Peas, from Katy Perry to Armin van Buuren, the artist gives life to a 'real' pop concert, where the images narrate in a hyperrealistic way a live concert that never actually took place.

Milizia's goal is to create a short-circuit between real and unreal, giving shape to and provoking actual emotions.

Critical essay by Luca Cerizza.

Mario Milizia
Mood Mixer