Purge

(Paperback)

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Part game show, part love story, part lecture exploring modern friendships.

Purge addresses where online friendship stops and real friendship begins. In 2010, Brian discovered that his deceased ex-boyfriend and best friend, Grant, had deleted him from Friendster (a pre-Facebook networking site), which neither had checked since they stopped dating in 2006. Although they had since re-friended in life (both virtually and non-virtually), it was the discovery of this past de-friending (and impossibility to reconnect since Grants death), which inspired Brian to create Purge in 2011.

In 2011, Brian Lobel played a brutal game of friendship maintenance: over 5 days in cafs in both London and Kuopio, Finland, Brian gave strangers one minute to decide which of his 1300 Facebook friends to keep or delete. The deleting was real, the pace was maniacal, the results were final.

50 hours of performance, 800 emails from angry, amused and intrigued friends and over 2500 comments from people watching via live stream later, Purge is an interactive performance lecture exploring the process of, and fallout from purging and examines how we emotionally and socially interact with digital media.

Author Bio

Brian Lobel creates performances about bodies: politicized bodies, marginalized bodies, dancing and singing bodies, happy bodies, sick bodies and bodies that need a little extra love. After being sick as a young adult, he became fascinated with unique bodily experience and how it is conceived, discussed and witnessed by others, leading him directly into his current performance practice. While the work takes many different forms - installation, stage shows, cabaret, interactive performance and publications - each project is keenly interested in how you (the audience) relate both to Brian and to others. Brian combines his intimate stories with grander public narratives (about illness, technology, nationalism, economy, sexuality and more) in an attempt to show that we are all in this together. The work playfully inspires audiences to consider the world around them with renewed vigor, generosity, reflection and an insatiable desire to engage with others.