PARACETAMOL OVERCLOCK

Paracetamol Overclock is an electro-pneumatic installation that transposes body movements and organic tensions into a strange computational choreography.

The work presents a makeshift hermetic system that recodes spasms, microstimuli, and autonomic processes into a rigged choreographic narrative enacted by the scattered body of an electro-pneumatic somnambulist gamer. As an exercise in fictional computation-as-performance, the work presents the dynamics of movement, gesture, and sound among separate agents, whether scattered or organized, as foundational discrete values for the rigging of a ‘something’: a task, a function, an apparatus, a drill.

Adopting and refitting imagery from puppetry, stage design, and props, the work simultaneously establishes one or multiple characters: on the one hand, the gamer, nodding to the high-skill competitive world of e-sports, synthesizes a funnelling of the body as a reflex-tuned armature, a rigged-structure responding to microstimuli through involuntary contractions; the somnambulist, on the other hand, presents the central nervous system hijacked by the Solar Plexus, or cerebrum abdominale, through a spasmic effigy based on a 1918 diagram of the bundle of nerves and ganglia: a regression into a more rudimentary form of life short-circuiting the brain. The somnambulist gamer, a union of these characters, is the personification of the tic-rig: it plots through twitching, cramping, and breathing, enacting a scripted, retrojected choreography that bootstraps the computational puppetry: a visibly seamed model of the world as Rig.

Open to a multitude of meanings, rigging can be understood as the assembling of technical support structures, to make something appear, to coat and present (to ‘make-up’), to fit something, or to prepare for movement (as in sailing), but also as the dishonest plotting of something, to fix a situation. Rigging as world-model, to rig as to have strings-pulled.