As an artist I started travelling around the world very early and met a lot of versatile and extraordinary people. I was fascinated by human relationships, special communities, underground movements and social interaction and that led to my study in sociology. Shortly before I started writing my master thesis I met a guy whose behavior seemed irritating, strange and as if he was reciting a speech or a theatrical pattern. My interest was captured and I started researching things he did and said. That’s how I found out about the secret community of pickup artists.
The pickup artists see themselves professional seducers. They train manipulative and psychological techniques to seduce women. It’s a whole industry of coaches, internet forums, local groups, books, internet forums. They use their own vocabulary and the more women you “lay” the higher you get in the hierarchy. I wrote my master thesis about “pua’s” and when my studies were published there was a huge public awareness. Newspapers, tv networks, radio stations and magazines wrote about me and my studies.
The pua’s reacted with lots of hate mails, threats and insulting phone calls. Yet, I still started working on my PhD about pickup artists in 2012. Because I am not only a researcher but also an artist I wanted to express my knowledge about the community in an artificial way, too. I wanted to inform people about the existence of puas, make them see the phenomenon through a young girls eyes. That was when I started working on a theater play and later on a screenplay for Game Over and wrote the story of Gloria and Julien.
