Fail to lose

This will be another virtual game for the artist. The game starts with a message to the public saying that during the play they are allowed to measure the speed of the actions of the performance and or video but they are also warned that the system is fully operational and indipendent and does all of this on its own.

Of course the entire thing is a big fake and nothing of the kind happens and the entire game is just bullshitting the concept of speed and recognition of time as well as the strange need some performers have to define what exactly are the boundries between performing in the arts and acting. This game is fast and at times slow. It deals with a lot of cliches performers have to deal with on a daily basis in their professional lives. For example always having to have the element of improvisation in each work… Does FAIL TO LOSE have this element? We don’t know because the game reveals, as it goes on, every detail as if it were premeditated in advance.

The game constantly tells the audience what went wrong in each phase and what should happen next. It also leads the performer through a rigid structured system of rules he or she have to follow in order to fail to lose. It even goes further… as far as I know no performer was ever given instructions by his own system during the performance to explain the performace itself to his/her audience. This time this will happen and it will have to be done with a fast speed.

And here we come to the title: FAIL TO LOSE

Since I was in highschool I was always inspired by my latin teachers teachings of ancient scripts. One particular prophet was intriguing me: Pitia. She would profess two things at a time leaving her clients unaware that their loved ones could live or die. I’ll explain: men and women would come to her and ask if they would return from war safe and sound. She would say: “Ibis, rebibis, non in Bello morietur.” and depending on where she would put the comma, the sentence would mean two totally different things. One meaning is: “You will go, you will come back, you will not die in war.” And the other meaning was: “You will go, you will not come back, you will die in war.”

FAIL TO LOSE has the same structure but without the need of comma games. It’s meaning is ambivalent: It can mean that the goal of the game is to fail in order to lose and that could mean that if you lose, you have accomplished the ultimate goal of the game. You have to lose in order to win the game, so to say. But it also means that the performer is constantly failing to lose the game and hence not winning it since the actual goal is to lose in order to win.

And so we are left with the dilemma weather or not the game is lost or won in the end. And it is a dilemma that can never be discussed to the end because if a decision is to be made wether or not the performer won then a lot of paradoxes and questions arise. For example: if you won the game, then that means you lost it in order to win it. But if you win, that means you didn’t lose, but you had to lose to win and so you lost. But if you lost, that means you actually won… but you lost it cause you won it… and so on to infinity…

Speed has been calculated internally, meaning that I calculated the rythm in order to produce a certain state of concentration in the public in order for them to stay concentrated for as long as possible without losing interest in the action taking place in the performance.