Paracetamol Overclock
Air
compressor, polyurethane hose, solenoid valves, venturi vacuum, pneumatic
cylinders, thermoplastic elastomer, latex, silicone, aluminium sheet, steel
wire, polyurethane foam, plaster, polylactic acid, dc motors, epoxy resin,
electronics, other mixed media, dimensions variable.2026, exhibited at ROSALUX, Berlin, 27.05-31.05.26
Paracetamol Overclock is 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 among movements, gestures, or sounds between separate agents, regardless of whether scattered or organised, as foundational discrete values for the rigging of a ‘something’: a task, a function, an apparatus, a drill.
Adopting and refitting imageries from puppetry, stage-design, and props, the work establishes either one or multiple characters in a simultaneous manner: on one hand the gamer, nodding to the high-skill competitive world of e-sports, synthesizes a funneling 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 made out of 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.