DreamHack began in 1994, in the basement of a nearby elementary school, as a small, local subvariant of what was then called a ‘‘copy­party’’ — pre-­broadband occasions to share software or demonstrate flashy off-­label uses of early home computers. As the event has grown, its enormous ad hoc network has been given over largely to gaming; for far-flung clans of four or five teammates, this can be the only chance they get all year to palaver in person. But participants also use the LAN to collaborate on all manner of projects, from songs to films to digital artworks, all of which are presented to the crowd.

Franck Bohbot, a 35-year-old Parisian photographer who has lived in Brooklyn since 2013, traveled to this summer’s DreamHack and captured the event’s dazzling disarray. He calls his experience there ‘‘monumental, but also very scary — to see all of this digital consumerism in one place.’’ For three round-the-clock days, he captured Boschian visions of digital abandon. ‘‘Everyone was geeking out,’’ he says. ‘‘It was a cathedral of the digital world.’’ What is immedi­ately arresting about the photographs themselves is their emphasis on the corporeal. Bohbot documented the bodies behind the user names, and you can’t help being struck by their range of personal ornamentation: the fuzzy-­unicorn hats and other eccentric headpieces, the wiz­ardly wig beards and electric mohawks, the piercings and tattoos.

Bodies, of course, no matter the sustained commitment to caffeine intake, are prone to breakdown, and Bohbot was drawn not only to those alert at their monitors but also to those collapsed at the feast, facedown in pillows that soften their keyboards. (Bohbot noted that most people are very politely quiet in the evenings, to let the weary rest.) Even the machines, in Bohbot’s vision, begin to take on an almost biological form. Home-­rigged computer towers with translucent siding, their interiors threaded with the elliptical glow of LEDs, resemble those integrated-­circuit fishes of the sea’s dark sulfurous trenches; the tangles of Ethernet cables swamp the tables in a tentacular turmoil, like gray kelp strewed about by a receding tide.

In an era of pervasive broadband, it is fair to wonder why anyone needs DreamHack, or hackathons, at all. Isn’t the whole point of the digital revolution that even the most complex collaborative tasks can be accomplished via the asynchronous labor of a distributed work force? It was never in doubt why a communal blowout represented a good strategy for raising barns; it is far less obvious why we need anyone to get together to produce, say, another Uber-­style app to pick up your laundry.