![Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt)Ocho cuadrados [Eight Squares]1961welded and painted iron66 15/16” x 25 3/16” x 15 3/4”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/1ec27465e0f6efc3b71c758be6f762aa/tumblr_mkumihmM2z1r24ddao1_400.jpg)
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt)
Ocho cuadrados [Eight Squares]
1961
welded and painted iron
66 15/16” x 25 3/16” x 15 3/4”
Department of Biological Flow
Pac-Man Death Ritual
2012
process machine for kleinian gamespace
Austin, Texas
- - -
An aesthetico-ethical gamespace is pre-imaged in Austin, TX, featuring a topological folding of the infamous Pac-Man videogame. The Department of Biological Flow players are to move in variations of 8-bit robotic through grid-like formations around an irregular gameboard.
Banana rewards await, and will be ingested.
Just as Pac-Man folds in upon itself at death, so too will the players — attempting an inversion of the body as if a contracting klein bottle in the death throes of impulsion. The banana peel remains — as remains — of this infolding or unfolding. And again and again, until the gaming process is complete.
Only en route do they find out the gamespace has already begun.
-
Performance time: approximately 3.5 hours or 20 minutes.
top:
Bridget Riley
Movement in Squares
1961
tempera on hardboard
-
bottom:
Bridget Riley
Twist
1963
tempera on hardboard
Department of Biological Flow
NASA (New Analog Space Anticipation)
2012
performance and video
-
The Museum of Human Achievement
Austin, TX
- - -
The moiré — as a spacing operation of grids laid upon one another — is not the same as Deleuze and Guattari’s smooth space emerging or escaping from the limits of striation, nor is it the same as the holey space that connects the striated and smooth via declination or vortical movement. And yet its watered silk still offers us a hydraulic model to perceive, but only when we are in movement. When standing still the traces of the moiré’s interference pattern remain as afterimages, barely perceptible — though it has only come to life in the first place once we have as well: in movement (cf. the discontinuity of Massumi’s ‘movement-vision’??). Rippling, shimmering: as we move with these grids our relation unfolds to suggest previously unseen contours and trajectories lying dormant within the metric machinery of these information ecologies.
