It considers questions of belief – about the practice, and who might be benefiting from, an economy of belief manipulation. The show also contains traces of Cordyceps fungi, the so-called ‘zombie fungus’, which takes over the brain of host ants, impels the ant individual to leave its clan in a kamikaze mission to further the fungus’s propagation. The fungus takes the ant to a suitable location and climate for its growth, kills it and uses its corpse as a launching pad for a fruiting body, which sprouts directly out of the ant’s head and explodes spores to infect more ants.
Furthering this theme, in the Baker-Miller pink ‘recovery room’, David Cronenberg’s 1999 gamer body-horror eXistenZ plays on mute. In eXistenZ game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and ‘total PR nerd’ Ted Pikul (Jude Law) enter the game that Allegra designed via anus-like ‘bio-ports’ connected (this is before bluetooth) via ‘umby-cords’ to ‘meta-flesh pods’ that contain the game and writhe into life when you flick them. Inside, Allegra and Ted are both themselves and their game avatars who want to fuck, say lines and shoot people. In a restaurant in a forest in the game, Ted asks for the chef’s ‘special’, which arrives and sees him noisily shuck and slurp at the flesh of a platter full of ‘mutant reptiles and amphibians’. This clearly repulses him. Allegra: ‘Pikul, what are you doing?’ Ted: ‘I don’t know. I find this disgusting, but I can’t help myself.’ Allegra, ever the game designer, is pleased, and calls this a ‘genuine game urge’ – ‘something your character was born to do’.
The game has its kinks. At times an auxiliary character gets stuck in a ‘game loop’ and Ted and Allegra need to repeat their line and address the character by name to snap them out of it, to progress the play. There is no ostensible way to win the game, rather the characters’ desires, as they emerge through gameplay, dictate the conditions of ‘winning’. This choose-your-own, non-climactic format feels similar to that of MemePlex™. Also, Ursula K. le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In it, Le Guin outlines a science fiction, thereby technology and science, that ‘avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic’ and is ‘primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination’. MemePlex™ too sidesteps the big stick, preferring an accumulation. If we’re talking about determinism, we’re also talking about desire. MemePlex™ explores themes of contamination and bleeding-into, belief and free will. But it also nudges into the tyranny of delight, loving the meme and the liberating possibilities of desire. To quell a quaking Ted, Allegra tells him ‘You’re going to do it anyway, you may as well enjoy it.’
MemePlex™ is on show at London’s Seventeen Gallery until February 19, 2022