1. INTRO

The experience of losing yourself has many names. Some call it ecstasy, trance or Rausch, the oceanic experience, collective effervescence or communitas. What they have in common is that they all circle around a similar (affective) experience of unity, connectedness and the becoming-one with a crowd. A feeling which I came to call losing yourself, and which I’m using as a working term throughout this project.

My research did not begin with the experience of losing yourself. It began with my interest in the clubbing crowd and the question of how such a crowd comes into being. I started by documenting what others had observed and written about crowds and collective dancing in the context of club and rave culture.

Along the way my focus shifted, I became more interested in not only how a crowd forms, but what it can produce: A temporary weakening of the perceived boundaries between the self and the others, allowing you to lose yourself in a club.

Why is this important?

The social context of this project plays a vital role to me. Our everyday life is increasingly individualized, digitized and mediated through screens. We work to pay our own rent, buy own food, and constantly adapt (on our own), so that we can function as productive workers in this highly competitive and often digital world.

With this project I want to argue that we need to actively find, create, and cherish different ways of being together offline. I find that clubbing can be a shared ritual, where we can be in an intensely physical and collective human experience together. Offline and open-minded in some kind of a harmony. In other words: There lies a possibile utopia on the dance floor.

I decided to keep the project open, as an ongoing process of researching this experience and moment inside a club or party. For my documentation I bought a notebook. For me, it seemed the ideal way to collect thoughts, write down observations, quotes and ideas. It is small enough to fit in my purse and go wherever I go, even inside a club.

This notebook is the carrier bag I brought along on this journey, a documentation of my research process. The carrier bag is a metaphor for my methodology and draws on Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay in which she argues that the first human innovation was not a weapon, but a container. One of her central ideas is that the novel can function like a bag, holding different characters, unfinished thoughts, and messy details. Just like my notebook here.

Along the way, I found the title: „How To Lose Yourself In A Club”. It is a working title and meant to stay, since this work is still in progress; eventually leading to further research.

2. THE PROJECT

My goal is to document my research process of the feeling of losing yourself in a club, collect thoughts from others and my own, to get a grasp of this feeling, what it means, where it comes from, and how to experience it.

My medium of choice is a notebook and a pen. Since this is a digital documentation, I'm scanning all pages of my notebook and hand them in as a PDF (see attached in the next chapter). 

I deliberately decided on an analog and written form of documentation, instead of filming or photographing the clubbing crowd. This decision is based on my strong belief that the experience of losing yourself in a club can only be lived and experienced in real life, not filmed or photographed. 

Here, I need to mention the impossibility of putting this experience into words (p.72-73). By collecting thoughts, notes and quotes in a written form, I'm not claiming to depict the phenomenon itself, but rather circle around it in describing it with words written on paper, where I can't erase or delete anything once written down.

Language Note: In this work, I regularly switch from German to English and back again. The shift between the two languages is symbolic of the two areas of my life that meet here: on the one hand, my studies, in which I work mostly in German; and on the other, my involvement in the association CareLab e.V., with which I produce clubbing experiences (raves) and in which I mostly interact, write, and reflect in English.

2.1 MY SCANNED NOTEBOOK

2.2 THE PROCESS

Starting into the project, I was strongly inspired by Ben Malbon’s famous work Clubbing from the late 1990s. It helped me understand that the clubbing crowd was at the core of the social phenomenon of clubbing.

Malbon also touches upon my research interests of losing yourself. He describes it as the oceanic experience. In The Dancer From The Dance he also mentions the Greek term for ecstasy (éxtasis), as an altered state of consciousness produced by the clubbing crowd (p. 6-7). The first link to the Greeks was made here. A society very far away from our modern-day highly technologized club culture with its sound systems, industrial design architecture, smoke machines, light shows and party drugs.

Early in my project, I contacted the artist and researcher Bogomir Doringer, who generously gave me access to several of his own works and the ones commissioned by him. One being Politics of Exctasy by filmmakers Chiara Badini and Rafaek Kozdron from 2019. In this short film, I learned about the Bacchanalia in ancient Rome (p. 9-10). The Bacchanlia was the adoption of an older spiritual practice, where the follower of Bacchus would gather to dance to repetitive drums, consume stimulating substances, participate in ceremonial sex and break with everyday conventions. In other words: a rave. However the rituals had a spiritual purpose, they wanted to feel close to nature and come in contact with the gods through a trance-like state.

Later in the process of research, I’m stumbling across the Bacchanalia again, in Geburt der Tragödie, Friedrich Nietzsche describes how the ancient Greeks partook in the rites of Dionysos to feel connected to one another, to nature, and god (p. 92-93). Something that I imagined a bit like the famous rave scene in Matrix. Similar rituals, different Gods.

What remains the same for back then and now is that, music and dance function as portals: They open up passageways to different times, different spaces, and different modes of being (p. 83).

It was Bacchus for the Romans and Dionysus for the Greeks. But what god, if any, are we trying to get in contact with on modern-day dancefloors?

The concept of reaching an altered state of consciousness and feeling one with the crowd appeared pretty early in my notebook and was going to become the central theme of my research project, something I was coming back to again and again, like the movements of a spiral, circling back to it and eventually ending with the image of a spiral visualizing the losing of the self itself (p. 94)

At one of my own parties in June, I wanted to observe the becoming-one with the crowd in action. I decided to conduct two exploratory mapping exercises to see whether the transformation of individual dancers into a collective body could be visualized

The first mapping documented the number of people in different rooms of the club at five points throughout the night: entry, beginning of the night, peak, beginning of closing, and the end (p. 20–27). Based on these observations, I created heat maps showing how people were distributed across the club space over time. These visualizations did not show the individuals at all, but rather their collective presence: warm, bright spots within the layout of the club, representing the density of the crowd at different moments.

The second mapping, however, came closer to what I wanted to visualize. I drew lines into the layout of the club, each representing the movement of an individual guest through the space (p. 21, 28–37). At first, every trajectory could be understood as belonging to a separate body. But as more and more lines accumulated, the individual paths became impossible to retrace.

The visualization showed an entanglement of so many lines, impossible to detangle from one another. The lines have become something that resembles one continuously moving line through the club space. It showed the losing of the individual and the becoming-one. However, it didn’t show the continuous process and transformation of the crowd, which leads up to this embodied experience.

Both exercises couldn't give an answer to the question: What is the process behind crowd-becoming? (p. 18)

I found several theories, books, and statements about this transformation, leading me to a point where I could list the different steps that had to happen to become a crowd (p. 74-75). These steps led me to find my working title, „How to lose yourself in a club?”, which from then on became my guiding question and sparked inspiration for further research, which will eventually lead to my master thesis (p. 70-71).

This is when I decided to turn to a classic media studies perspective. If I wanted to write my master thesis about this phenomenon, I needed a medium at its center. And since the clubbing crowd was the starting point of my research, I decided to look at the clubbing crowd as a medium (p. 80-81).

I understood then that the clubbing crowd, in a broader definition of a medium, is conveying information. Not in a classical communication medium kind of way, but as an affective collective body. The clubbing crowd mediates between singular selves on the dance floor and conveys a vibe (p. 86). The vibe helps the dancers to deepen a relationship to the music, to the DJ, to the club/environment around them, and affects the interactions and relations between themselves on dance floor (p. 87).

This perspective opened up another way of understanding losing oneself. The crowd is not merely something surrounding the individual. The individual becomes part of a collective body that affects them while they simultaneously affect it. The crowd is constantly being produced by the individuals within it, while also transforming their individual experiences.

3. CONCLUSION

In this notebook are so many loose ends that it may consist of only loose ends. Ready to be picked up at any moment.

One of these loose ends concerns the way ecstatic experiences can temporarily loosen social conventions and everyday rules (p. 11) This can enable behavior that is restricted, stigmatized or less tolerated in the outside world. For example: open expression of diverse identities, open drug consumption, nudity, sexual kinks, expressive dance moves, and many more. This is only broadly touched upon on page 90, when I'm introducing the theory of play by Roger Callois (p. 90).

I couldn't research on club culture without acknowledging its deep roots in queer communities, particularily in the histories of dance music like disco, house and techno. Clubs and raves are spaces, which don't only feel different from the outside world; but also shield and protect from it. They can function therefor as a safe spaces from systemic homophia, transphobia or racism, that awaits LGBTQ* partygoers and BIPoC in the outside world (p. 76-78). There is so much more to write about the topic of queerness and raves… Maybe for another time.

There is also a strong link between peak religious experiences and the peak rave experience, which are mostly described in quotes by the enlightening Hillegonda C. Rietvield on various pages throughout the notebook, where I learned that nightclubs can be regarded as a secular type of night-time church where music, dancing, repetition, and collective participation can enable experiences that resemble religious ecstasy (p. 42–46, 58–62).

Other theories found their way into my carrier bag, but they have different aspects of club culture close to them. For example, Michel Foucault’s Heterotopien, which rather touches upon the subcultural capital and the embodied knowledge of the clubbing experience (p. 68-69). Or the theory of atmosphere from Gernot Böhme, which looks at structures, light, and sound as creators of atmospheres, which have an affective power on the well-being of individuals in a space (p. 91).

There are so many theories I could still add more. However, I decided to make a stop here for now (p. 94), with the spiral. The spiral is not only a symbol of transformation and continuous becoming, but also visualizes the entanglement of different entities. Individual bodies becoming part of a collective body, and the together they experiene a sense of connectedness with their surroundings, with nature, or even with something divine.

This might be the answer to my earlier question: What god are we trying to connect with on the modern-day dance floors?

It’s not Bacchus, nor Dionysus. On today's dance floors, perhaps there is no god waiting for us. Perhaps what we encounter is each other.

On the dance floor, for a short moment, we break open the limitations of the self. Music, movement, repetition, space, atmosphere and other bodies unlock a transformative power and open the portals to a different world outside the social conventions of everyday life.

A world so different from the one awaiting us outside the club. Less lonely, less commodified, less linear, less normative–rather free.

We lose ourselves on the dancefloor and for a short moment, when we are really open to it, we find each other. 

4. DOCUMENTATION ENVIRONMENT

5. MATERIAL

Badini, C., & Kozdron, R. (Regisseure). (2019). Politics of Extasy [Video].

Baudelaire, C. (2008). Le spleen de Paris: Paris spleen petits poèmes en prose: Little prose poems. Reclam.

Buckland, F. (2002). Impossible dance: Club culture and queer world-making. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

Doringer, B. (Regisseur). (2025). Dance of Urgency [Video].

Faithless. (1998). God is a DJ [Song].

Graham St John. (2009). Rave culture and religion. London Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Jackson, P. (2004). Inside clubbing: Sensual experiments in the art of being human. Berg Publishers.

Garcia-Mispireta, L. M. (2023). Together, somehow. Duke University Press.

Gernot Böhme. (2019). Atmosphäre Essays zur neuen aÄsthetik. Berlin Suhrkamp.

Goetz. (2020). Rave. Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Le Guin, Ursula K.: Die Tragetaschentheorie der Fiktion, in: Angerer, Maire-Luise und Gramlich, N. (2020): Feministisches Spekulieren. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos

Feministisches Spekulieren. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos. S. 33-40

Leckey, M. (2011). Fiorucci made me hardcore [YouTube-Video]. Abgerufen von https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dS2McPYzEE

Madonna. (1990). Vogue [Song].

Malbon, B. (2005). Clubbing : Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge. Abgerufen von https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Clubbing-Dancing-Ecstasy-and-Vitality-by-Ben-Malbon.pdfRainald 

Nietzsche, W. F. (1872). Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. Insel Taschenbuch.

Olaveson, T. (2004). ‘Connectedness“ and the rave experience: Rave as new religious movement? Rave and Religion, 85–106. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203507964-7

Rietveld, H. (2004). Ephemeral spirit: sacrificial cyborg and communal soul.

Wark, M. (2024). Raven. Merve Verlag.