Creating Intensities: Affect in Acid Reign Raves

Abstract

Through collaborating with a rave collective, this project inquires into Acid Reign Productions (ARP) organizers' strategies and considerations for creating affects. Here, affective situations are conceptualized as smoothened timespaces of intensities that could involve harm reduction (HR). Following Toronto's resurgence of outdoors raves, this work discusses how HR in these raves presents to appease extremes and incoherencies, taking part in the collective's approach of 'maximizing mutual benefit'. Fieldnotes from ARP raves and conversations with organizers and attendees are pulled together, describing ways of augmenting intensities and how they affect and are affected by the contexts from which ARP emerges. Materials, audiovisuals, roles, substances, and conversations take part in creating affective situations and shape forms of HR in ARP beyond biomedical logics. By creating affects, ARP opens up capacities for flux and indeterminacies, even when the group may engage with more formal organizations and frameworks.