Teen Spirit Island

Imagine Kurt Cobain on the island of the Phaeacians -- this will give you a first impression of the therapy station in Hannover where game-addicted youth are prevented from giving in to their purported bliss: “Here we are now, entertain us, / I feel stupid and contagious.” The name of this facility, Teen Spirit Island, indicates a potential terminus point toward which a segment of the youngest gamer generation is headed. Elevated to the title of a work by Joscha Steffens, however, a lurking ambivalence within it sketches out a different path—assuming the striplings can be set on the track of success early enough. A habit, on the one hand, which appears as a pathology requiring therapy, represents at the same time an eSport athlete’s daily professional routine on the other. In juxtaposition with their avatars, these portraits thus tell the story of a contemporary odyssey of which the destination is not yet determined. Is the home harbor—Teen Spirit Island—a professional career in the figure of a limitless pleasure principle? Or is it on the contrary the hard earth of therapeutic reality upon which so many soaring flights have crashed?