The Game Of Life

Around them, six “Displacement Operators” engage the playful mobilities to follow: the Man-De, this “scribe of history” who never ceases to plunge from his Nagol tower, strikes down a sequence of stamps. Simultaneously, the other operators interact in the form of gutter ball games, multiple-choice “suspenders” and earthy stomachs, respectively determining the direction of trajectories, the number of squares to be covered and the final decision to remake (or not) the pieces selected by this cog. It’s a question of ruminating endlessly on the propensity of the entire work to self-replicate in segments, with a string of clinamens to back it up. The principle of the cellular automaton, which Barbier explicitly borrows from the field of science, enables him to conceive a vast, random playground where each cell constantly redistributes itself according to its surroundings. As a result, versions abound and cohabit, and can be reinterpreted over and over again in the “I’d say even more” mode.

The unfinished motif of the work, if it exists at all, is a proliferating tapestry, escaping through complexities that constantly parasitize, aerate and recombine it. Worse still, the proposals unfold from the outside via “production machines” that manufacture them, so to speak, all by themselves – once the basic protocols have been formulated. Like the eponymous character created by Luke Rhinehart, this is how the artist can launch himself outside himself. The crystallization of choice is less important than its suspension. Each of the operators aims precisely at stretching this lapse of time as far as possible, leaving the decision-making doors wide open: between the release of the marbles and the result they will eventually inscribe, the machine chuckles at the ebullition of the potens, and at the same time guards against definitive options. Locomotion feels at ease, as if in a 4×4 with six independent and interchangeable drive wheels, threatening to break the skin of the cockpit under the plurality of centrifugal dissidences.

Charlotte Serrus (2012)