{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Killscreen Podcast","title":"Nobody Knows What Happens Next","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2597,"description":"I open with Tomo Kihara, a Tokyo designer who has built an arcade cabinet that nobody scripted, and put a question to Danny Snelson that runs through the whole hour: what happens to authorship when the designer does not know the outcome either? The through line for this cycle is work built to outlast the thing it was made on.\n\nKihara's What Plays You? Game of Possible Lives is a cabinet running a language model locally, generating a statistically plausible Japanese life out of census data. You steer that person through their decisions and you get exactly one rewind. Danny puts the authorship problem in a much longer line, back through Dada and the constraint-based writing of the 1960s, where the artist produces a set of rules that might themselves be the work. The only new thing here is that one of the players is a large language model. What moves me is the venue: the cabinet has travelled from the museum to a hotel lobby, so the people playing it are the ones passing through hotels, airports and train stations rather than the ones who chose to visit a museum. Danny lands on Marc Augé's non-places, and on the fact that a census is a state instrument, which puts a game about ordinary lives in exactly the spaces where ordinary life is watched most closely.\n\nThen Christian Marclay's The Clock, which I went to see in Los Angeles. Twenty-four hours, every minute cut from a different film, synchronized to the time on your own watch. It is ludic without containing a single game mechanic. You watch it hunting, and Danny calls it the ultimate collectathon on both sides at once: whoever had to find a usable clip for all 1,440 minutes, and the viewer collecting them back one at a time. It also could not be made this way now. The labor is the work, and a model asked to find every clock would dissolve it.\n\nTo close, Wristwork's Pigeon: A Love Story, where you are a pigeon crossing London, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Amsterdam looking for one specific other bird. The commercial...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/zTYr6doDWNgE9y4YNtSYWKFBPjWC_pIPoM2oNdCN1X0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80MGIx/ZDc3YWEyZTY5MzFl/NmNmNmZlZWFmMTRl/YmNhYS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}