FEVER!

In the mid-00s, actor Nicolas Cage starred in a series of Japanese TV commercials for the pachinko manufacturer Sankyo. He plays the piano, rides with cowboys, dances with aliens, screams “FEVER!” In one of them, a pearl earring rolls off a woman’s ear, down her body, hits the floor and suddenly the entire surface is covered in what seem to be small metal balls. Cage appears, shouting: “I love pachinko!” All of the commercials are fragmented, absurd, quick montages that don’t necessarily communicate anything specific. In a way, they operate on the same principle as the machine they’re selling: keep the current flowing.

In his short essay on pachinko in Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes describes the parlour not as a space of leisure but of “a deliberate, absorbing labor; never an idle or casual or playful attitude.” Players stand in rows, each sealed in their own loop, feeding metal balls into machines with an abrupt, uninterrupted gesture. Everything is decided in a single movement. What Barthes calls a “nutritive circuit”: money converted into balls, balls into flow, flow into modest, absurd rewards – a candy bar, an orange, a pack of cigarettes. The point is not what is won but that the circulation continues. Pachinko, in this reading, is less a game than a model – for how capital moves, how attention is held, how desire is kept in place by the system that produces it. [1]

Short Circuit takes this logic as its starting point. A short circuit occurs when excessive current bypasses its intended path, when the system overloads on its own energy. The exhibition is structured accordingly: the exhibition space is designed as a closed circuit, a pinball architecture through which the viewer moves without exit, entering the circuit.

—Abirami Logendran

[1]Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 27–29.

The exhibition is curated by Abirami Logendran in collaboration with Pachinko