Paracetamol Overclock

Paracetamol Overclock is an electropneumatic installation that transforms spasms, microstimuli, and autonomic processes into a strange computational choreography, in which the body becomes the setting for a mechanical fiction.

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 organized, 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, rig and 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.

About Diego Behncke
Diego Behncke is an artist and musician whose work emerges from fictional configurations that employ processes of abstraction and synthetic operations. Favoring a diagonal approach, techniques of obscuration take center stage in installation and performance contexts, fostering an encounter between the history of technology, bio-mythographic structures, and inorganic paleoarchaeology. Originally from Santiago, Diego lives in Berlin.

As part of his artistic practice, he runs the experimental music label Prensa Manual.

Tickets
Self-Guided Experience
Book a time slot, then receive an email with a code that grants you access to EISODE for a private one-hour session with the artwork.
60 minutes
$6.75
1–4 people

Guided Experience
Over a cup of tea, the EISODE host introduces the exhibition and guides your attention to enhance a vibrant artistic experience.
75 minutes
$24
1–4 people