Created in 2023 by swiss collective Fragmentin, G80 is an interactive installation which proposes a contemporary interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game“. Visitors interact with a matrix of sliders, each corresponding to a variable of one of 80 human conditions selected by the artist. When a single slider is moved, other sliders correlate with each other and forming changing patterns without their intervention, suggesting interference/effect to/on other variables.
Inspired by the War Games and strategy games, this global scenario simulation game aimed to achieve “an equitable distribution of resources”. Created in the cybernetic era in the early 1960s, it embodies the promise of computation and mathematical models for solving socio-political and ecological problems such as overpopulation, energy, consumption, access to services, resources, etc. Today with the arrival of supercomputers, the multiplication of data and the advent of artificial intelligence, the realisation of such a total regulation project might be achievable.
In this device, the sliders act as both inputs and outputs. Visitors are invited to interact and playfully attempt to stabilise the world by changing the value of each variable. With no visual manifestations other than the names of the variables and their quantities, the visitors are encouraged to mentally visualise the concrete impact their choices could have on the Earth. There is no driving algorithm that connects variables to their actual description, nor the relationship between the individual variables. Instead, G80 questions the absurdity of the idea itself, which is rooted in an exhausted techno-capitalist system that refuses to look beyond mathematical models.
The device is built using 80 motorized touch sensitive sliders + drivers, 20 Teensy boards, custom PCBs and uses a Zotac computer running Linux and using Node JS.
In February 2024, the Fragmentin team ran a small workshop at Mudac, in the context of the ‘Space is the place, Terra’ exhibition. After a presentation and discussion of Buckminster Füller’s constants, a brief history of the World Game, and a presentation of the G80, participants were asked to recreate their own web version of the work, rethinking the labels present in the original G80 and adding a clickable hyperlink on the name of each variable:
G80 has been exhibited at Connected Earth — Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria (15/11/2024-14/11/2026), Ars Electronica — Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria (4-8/09/2024), Tools for Change — HeK, Basel (30/8-17/11/2024), Le commun — Mapping Festival, Geneva (16/05-26/05/2024), Space is the place, Terra — Mudac, Plateforme 10, Lausanne (08/09/2023-04/02/2024) and The Global Game – Somerset House — London, UK (01-25/06/2023).
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