G80 Install­a­tion

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How far are we prepared to go to optim­ise the manage­ment of the Earth? The G80 inter­act­ive device spec­u­lates on a global manage­ment system for plan­et­ary prob­lems that brings together differ­ent forms of intel­li­gence in a contem­por­ary rein­ter­pret­a­tion of Richard Buck­min­ster Fuller’s World Game. Inspired by war games and strategy games, this game of simu­lat­ing scen­arios on a plan­et­ary scale is aimed at “an equit­able distri­bu­tion of resources”.

Created during the cyber­netic era in the early 1960s and developed over several decades, this game embod­ies the prom­ise of compu­ta­tion and math­em­at­ical models for solv­ing socio-polit­ical prob­lems such as over­pop­u­la­tion, energy, consump­tion, access to services, and resources, etc.

The install­a­tion consists of a matrix of 80 motor­ised sliders on a console, remin­is­cent of a control room. Each slider corres­ponds to a named vari­able, with + and – signs meas­ur­ing their scale. Some of the vari­ables are directly inspired by those defined by Fuller and his students, while others have been redefined by Frag­mentin to refer to the major issues of our time, such as ecology, migra­tion, gender equal­ity, and the devel­op­ment of tech­no­lo­gical innov­a­tions. In this install­a­tion, the sliders act as both inputs and outputs.

The public is invited to inter­act with the work by chan­ging the value of the 80 vari­ables repres­ent­ing the phenom­ena at the heart of the Earth’s fragile balance. When no visitor inter­feres with the matrix, it activ­ates and alters the posi­tion of the 80 sliders to form geomet­ric patterns.