Scott Benzel

I. FORGET THE LABYRINTH/IGNORE WHAT MANNER OF BEAST/MIGHT RANGE IN IT II. ALL MEAN CLOSEQUARTERED THINGS WHO SELF/DESTRUCT YET SPARE A NUCLEUS TO BREED BACK (Sylvia Plath/James Merrill)

2024, first-person racer (videogame), accelerator pedal, flatscreen, electronics, honey, commercial fake blood, plastic tubing, wood; game programming by Naomi Sam

The title of this work is derived from the channeled Ouija Board poetry of Sylvia Plath and James Merrill.
"The “game” itself is unique in a number of ways: it has only one controller—an accelerator pedal—no real obstacles, and no goal. One goes either fast or slow, moving steadily across the land- and star-scapes through labyrinths of tubes filled with (digital) stage blood and honey. Scanned artifacts from museums around the world flicker past: plaster mathematical models, beehives, a 5th-century B.C.E. Minotaur bust. On the game’s second level (informed by the weird romantic-nuclear paranoia and (somehow airless) cosmic vision of the spirit channeled by James Merrill in The Changing Light at Sandover) the viewer (player?) drifts through data-derived simulations of cosmic and nuclear-physical phenomena, briefly traversing one of Saturn’s rings, glimpsing Oumuamau passing through whatever solar system this might be, glancing off a fission reaction, sliding across the stone of an ancient dolmen."

Scott Benzel: Notes on Parallel Worlds