Photographer Jordan Hemingway takes on collaboration to uncover the artistry behind ecstasy pills

The first thing that hits you when entering the Ask for it by name installation is a near opaque cloud of fog and a loud cacophonous noise, reminiscent of the “gnashing of teeth” from one of Dante’s circles of hell. As you step closer to the spotlight in the middle of the room, you see two pill presses, furiously pounding down, with targeted microphones pointed at their different gears and mechanisms. Once your senses get acclimated to the space, you start to hear music form the mechanics. It is  engineered by self-taught photographer and director Jordan Hemingway, who is seated discreetly in the corner of the room at a mixing board, controlling the volume of six microphones to create a composition out of the instruments that are usually only used to press ecstasy tablets.

“The fact that it comes out in a beat-like form is an absolute surprise to us,” Hemingway says. Although he is best known for his visual work, shooting lurid campaigns for Gucci, Comme des Garçons and Raf Simons, he’s not unqualified to put on a sound exhibit as his father is famed American jazz musician Gerry Hemingway, who taught him a thing or two about music.

The space is reminiscent of Berlin’s techno temples, as the windows have been blacked out with dark chalk paint, letting only slivers of light through like stained glass, and the fog is mixed with cigarette smoke. It is 2pm on a sunny day in the city, but Hemingway and his collaborators have been in the space working on the installation for three days straight, so it may as well be 2am to them.

Hemingway’s setup resembles a DJ booth as he works the sound board with a drink in hand while wearing Stefano Pilati’s cult club-favourite worker boots, but Comme des Garçons president and Dover Street Market founder Adrian Joffe, describes the experience as being like a Virginia Woolf novel. “It is a stream of consciousness, but it all comes together in a composition,” he says. The London-born concept store will eventually publish a coffee table book, also titled Ask for it by Name, about the insights, Jordan Hemingway and collaboration partner, neuropsychologist and videographer, Jan Henrich, have found as they dive into the visual language and cultural dialogues of ecstasy.

“We’re exploring the branding and visuals of ecstasy in the late 80’s,” Henrich says. “It has a superficiality, as opposed to LSD in the 60’s which had specifically made artwork for each batch.” The way the pills are made, different batches will have different colours and designs left on them by the pill presses that compress a certain amount of MDMA, the active ingredient that causes sensory awareness, with bulking agents and binders. While the different logos are useful to tell tablets apart, there is a humour to them that borrows from societal insignia and subverts the recognisable symbols by associating them with the drug. For better or worse, these symbols then become part of pop culture, from the heart and arrow pill in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (1997) to the news reports of the deadly pink Superman pill.

While Reference Festival in Berlin played host to the first live instalment of the project, Dover Street Market in London and LA, will facilitate its second and third iterations, which will include panel discussions, the book release, as well as a functional demonstration (without real drugs) of the pill presses that can produce 2,000 – 5,000 pieces per hour, which would have been up to 240,000 tablets between the two machines during the duration of the 24-hour Berlin festival.

“The project is by no means an endorsement,” Hemingway says, noting the risks associated with the drug and its attachment to major criminal enterprises. “We are documenting a process that is very much artistic. Someone took a lot of time to create these things.”

The team says they started in Berlin because it is the reigning capital of techno and party drug culture, while London bears significance as the home of the mid-Eighties Acid House movement that produced the smiley pill imagery. The last stop is LA, because the final evolution of any underground movement is to end up in Hollywood.