Temporary Pleasure have turned the carpark rave into art

For those who don’t know, what is Temporary Pleasure?

Temporary Pleasure is part rave, part artist practice – the rave as a work of art. It’s a shapeshifting club project, and it’s also the name I work under as an artist. It began as an architecture project and a pop-up club. I was born and raised in a nightclub in the west of Ireland. I used to sleep there as a baby while my parents worked, and I grew up working there as a teenager collecting glasses, working the bar. So nightlife has always been my life, but in a very rural, small-town Irish disco kind of way, and I grew up fantasising about a different kind of nightclub.

Eventually, I started putting on illegal raves and learned architecture as a way of building temporary club spaces. I wanted to create something that sat between those two worlds: the architecture of a club, with the emotion of rave. A one-night-only nightclub. Designed and built, but also emotional, ephemeral, and alive. So Temporary Pleasure became a pop-up, nomadic nightclub – something between a party, an installation, and a performance – popping up in different cities and then disappearing.

The architecture of Temporary Pleasure is a reaction to formats like Boiler Room and modern club culture, where the DJ is the focal point and source of energy, and the crowd are sort of just watching, facing the booth, passive spectators. I wanted to flip that completely and return to the feeling of a proper dance club, where the energy comes from the dancers themselves and the crowd is the show. Where the whole space is the stage – multi-level wraparound balconies, podiums and a central dancefloor.

Through light, spatial design and choreography, we shift the focus around the room throughout the night, spotlighting different people, encouraging exhibitionism, play, and even competition. It creates a contagious dance energy.

The project has been described as a rave architecture collective – what do you mean by rave architecture?

When I say “rave architecture”, I mean all these things. The architecture of both space and time, and the architecture of a feeling – a space that reminds you it only exists for one night and every second is precious, like you’re watching the sand slip through an hourglass. You’re standing on a structure that will be gone tomorrow and never exist again. That sense of right here, right now. It heightens everything. 

But rave architecture also means the architecture of raving – of participation. What makes a rave distinct from a club or any other space? For me, it’s not just the temporality, it’s the idea that your presence means something. A real rave isn’t about watching; it’s about being essential to the moment. The space should make people feel like this wouldn’t be happening without them.

On top of that, I also like to play with performance and heightened reality. To take that feeling of being ‘in the moment’ and push it further. Not choreography in the traditional sense – more like choreographing the night itself. Where and when the spotlight is going to land. I try to build in these surreal, elevated moments on the dancefloor that feel almost cinematic – like you’ve just stepped into a music video, or like, ‘What the fuck is this? How is this happening?’ And then pulling back to chaos again.

That kind of heightened reality makes people even more present. It’s also a dare to dance more, go further, to meet and go beyond that energy. I want to create a space that keeps escalating, where you never really know what’s coming next. At the extreme edge of space, time and reality.

Your installation at Feel The Sound explores “the deep connection between cars and dance music”. What do you mean by this? Can you pinpoint a pivotal memory that illustrates this for you?

Besides growing up in a nightclub, cars were my main gateway into dance music. I grew up in rural Ireland in the early 2000s obsessed with boy racer culture and its sound, aesthetics, and subculture. In a small town, cars meant everything: isolation/freedom, masculinity/queerness, music, identity, subculture, even sex.

My sister had a Honda Civic, and this CD wallet packed with trance and Limewire remixes. That was really how I got into dance music – burning CDs, connecting to the aux, making playlists for driving around with your mates at night. It was like a first taste of DJing. When YouTube and SoundCloud came along, the car kept showing up as a recurring image, a sort of default backdrop for dodgy remixes. It was all so intertwined as a sound, aesthetic and attitude. Bass-heavy car sound systems, raw, lo-fi high energy music and this bizarre, flamboyant hypermasculinity that, in hindsight, I related to because it felt weirdly queer, maybe that’s just me. But it was a world I felt both connected to and outside of. Something I have nostalgia for reliving, but twisted through the lens of Temporary Pleasure and contemporary club culture.

Later, I learned about the acid house rave convoys – where a bunch of cars would drive out to a location to find a party – and I’ve been dreaming about this project ever since. A mobile club made from four cars linked together as a sound and lighting system. Drive it anywhere and create a dancefloor out of nothing.

What do each of the four cars in the installation represent, and how did you go about commissioning the artists and collectives that you collaborated with?

It started as just one, but I always knew it had to be four cars – a four-point sound system. And they had to be arranged in a circle, with a dancefloor in the middle where you could feel the sound hitting you from all sides.

Originally, I was going to use ready-made cars with in-built sound systems, which is what I’d normally do – the bare minimum. But that wasn’t going to work with this duration and thousands of people coming through. No one was going to rent me a car for that long. So the project expanded. Ridiculously. Beautifully. Which meant building, scouring eBay to see what I could get my hands on, and figuring out how to make four different cars that could be hacked, rewired, and linked into a single sound and lighting system.

I wanted each one to feel distinct, not just visually, but sonically. Different sounds, different attitudes. One is an homage to UK/Irish boy racer culture – Y2K era hatchbacks, airbrushed paint jobs, cheap LED mods. Another draws from Japanese tuning and dance culture. Another from mobile sound system traditions and the aesthetics of drifting. And another is inspired by Mexican lowrider culture. It was also just a really fun opportunity to invite and collaborate with different people I knew who were into this car-music subculture and make four projects instead of one. We asked ourselves: how far can we push the concept? How do we make four crazy cars that aren’t just four speakers, but more like sculptures or characters? So each car became its own character, each one representing a different car and music subculture, tuned in collaboration with a different artist or label. 

The real challenge was getting them to work as one system. Designing them individually while also making sure they could link together. A hacked-together, choreographed, Frankenstein of DIY car culture and speaker engineering.

 

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Architecturally speaking, what are the key ingredients for a perfect club space? Does a particular club come to mind that fulfils this criteria?

In terms of a traditional permanent club, there are so many interesting archetypes and ingredients that add up to the total experience. Beyond the overall architecture, it’s about how the night unfolds, designing all those little moments that make up the journey. What’s the queue like? What’s the entrance experience? Where are the hotspots inside? What are the little nooks and crannies you can disappear into when you need a breather or want to get lost? The bathrooms are always a big one for me. I always had this idea to make a club that was just bathrooms – just cubicles and corridors, no main dancefloor, just loads of mini parties. Like a Berghain made entirely of pano toilets. 

But for me, the perfect club space is one that isn’t fixed. I’m interested in clubs that don’t feel finished, where the energy comes from the fact that it’s built just for this moment. That’s why I design clubs where the space itself is constantly shifting. As soon as a club is finished, it starts to become static, predictable, repetitive. The crowd learns how to behave inside it. You know exactly what you’re gonna find front and left next to the booth every Saturday. It becomes a backdrop. 

The perfect club experience should be in constant flux. It should be unstable. Experimental. A space that feels alive, because it’s always being reinvented. You should never know exactly where the energy is going to come from, or where it’s going to go next. That’s the difference between a traditional club and a rave. That’s why I design Temporary Pleasure to shift every time – new location, new design, new energy. No fixed form or definition. Temporary Pleasure is a club, an artist, and a living idea.