Self-brainwashing
Minnesota Street Project Foundation/re.riddle, San Francisco 2025

installation/performance/sound 

U.S. Premiere Co-Presented by Minnesota Street Project Foundation and re.riddle

Self-Brainwashing is an installation and performance that explores the shape and density of realities and the (de-)programming of the self through playful interventions. Inspired by ‘90s foam parties, Self-Brainwashing explores how whimsy, irreverence, and play might be effective stratagems to detangle and dissolve societal and psychological indoctrination and mental conditioning.

Participants are invited to wear white protective suits as they become gradually enveloped in ethereal, white foam. The experience creates a compelling duality of sensation—simultaneously delightful and disorienting—as participants find their senses both awakened and challenged by the surrounding foam environment. Foam, as a material, holds a paradoxical position. On one level, it seems almost too trivial for the seriousness of the subject at hand—brainwashing. It is the stuff of bath-time, of mass-market advertisements, of commercial culture, which is itself imbued with the emptiness of the post-Communist consumerist boom. But this very triviality is part of what makes it so pointed. The foam’s insubstantiality, its very impermanence, underscores the ephemerality of the ideological forces it represents. Ideology is rarely the product of forceful, violent indoctrination (though that is certainly part of it); more often, it operates on the level of suggestion, of the trivial and the banal, and of absorption into the everyday. From history, we have associated brainwashing with the overt methods of totalitarian states; here, Michailov reminds us of the quieter, more insidious forms of ideological control that have their roots in consumerism, in spectacle, and in the transformation of culture into a commodity.

Foam is its constant state of flux—it is never fully solid or liquid, but exists as an in-between substance, just as ideology operates in ways that are never fully visible but always active. To be immersed in foam is to experience an ideological system not as an alien, hostile force, but as something that one is absorbed into. Michailov’s very physicality in the foam brings this home. The performance enacts the conditions of alienation, of being ‘at one’ with a system that simultaneously renders the individual both invisible and overly visible. His body is swallowed by the foam, as though his identity is being overwritten or erased, but it is a gentle erasure—one that is less violent and more insidiously soft.

The spatial dynamics of Michailov's interactive work invite us to alter our own perception, (mis- and self-perception), and to go down a rabbit hole of existential inquiry: Where do I begin? Where do I end? Where do I come from and where am I going? Do I exist in the absence of my fellow human beings? How responsible am I to my surroundings? These questions become increasingly urgent in the age of AI, when human and computer interfaces are nearing the event horizon of singularity. Michailov describes the concept of Self-Brainwashing in computational terms, “like a hard drive deleting itself.”

Further thickening the experience, Michailov will collaborate with sound artists to create and play original compositions during the performance. Through a choreography of irreverent materiality and social constructions, Self-Brainwashing aims to create an intuitive yet mindful arena of wonder and play, where everyone can lose, or momentarily delete, the “self” whilst also finding themselves somewhere in the process.

Candace Huey (re.riddle)