yoyogi park is both a physical place - precisely, 35° 40' 10" N 139°41'45"E by the instagram handle of its primary organizer - and a recurring, temporary experience. held in public space, artworks are assembled into formations with materials available close at hand, often interchangeable with the practical trappings of public revelry - plastic bottles, cellophane, signage, cigarettes.

drawings, paintings and sculptures collide with trees and concrete, they casually overlap or get lost in the distance; they're jumbled together and then isolated in the euphoric gaze of camera-flash. experiencing these works online as a viewer feels like reviewing photos of the parties you actually attended, scattered across your friends' social media: sequences are disjointed then re-grouped by memory and emotion, certain details stand out in exaggerated focus. others, dreamlike, recede: a conversation of forgotten words whose imprint is still retained in the body.

the art event as a production of conviviality - people coming together to collectively re-imagine the use of tools and ideologies in ways which might deviate from their specialist functions in a given system - often betrays its promises; paradoxically, such proposals often commodify the very affects and strategies which they intend to generate as subversions. at yoyogi park we catch a different vibe: the artists of yoyogi park create a space of enjoyment which is free from the society's imperative to 𝘫𝘰𝘶𝘪𝘳. we all know we are performing, so there is no anxiety here except that which provides an affable aesthetic tension.

in establishing an ethos that resists hegemonic power, yoyogi park does not preach. we do not encounter reductive motifs of softness or a narrowly ideal affective range, but instead a concatenation of works which are themselves vulnerable (to the elements, to the pixel-degradation of consumer smartphones, to being disrupted, altered and re-invented by human revellers), works which are blurred in form and interpretation. there is room for frenzied activity, for raw and blunt expressions, for liquefaction, for an impossible romantic gesture, for restraint and for garishness.

the effect is not ramshackle, but relational - the works at yoyogi park trace invisibly concentric circles around each other and themselves. there is no perfectionism here, but there's a strange kind of purity -- you don't have to dismantle alienation first before real work happens. alienation is itself a terrain in which work and the construction of experiential meaning does occur and is always occurring all around us: always, insatiably, producing potent auras and social connections.

no matter the scenario, conviviality is always a performance. the artists of yoyogi park know they are performing both for us, the online viewers, and each other. similarly to the erotic exhibitionist (one who opens up their private pleasure to be intensified by the possibility of outside eyes), yoyogi park is aware that its joy is sociallly performative without in fact being staged.

in the routines of the present, our socially-displayed emotions are regulated, scrutinized, and subjected to the demand for complete verisimilitude. it is not enough to behave rightly, one must also convince others that they feel rightly, according to whatever judgements prevail within a particular group or situation. by refusing to make this demand, the participants and spectators of yoyogi park are granted a measure of benevolent alienation - one in which a generative communion is achieved through focused yet spontaneous working-together.

the word "community" can be a burden, but the artists at yoyogi park construct a working model - one which is different every time, and which bears a nuanced approach toward conviviality and alienation as possibile lockpicks for the average social constraints. by producing generative alienation, yoyogi park lends its performative agents and their viewers the room to be expressive, inventive, and emotive without resorting to prescriptivism and cliche, as well as an interpretive apparatus (nestled within tiny streams of online culture) by which its ambiguities can be seen, experienced, and interpreted according to their own faulty and ecstatic narratives.