Vexations and Doom: Serious Mobility
Doom and Marathon are twitch games. The success of these games depends on the degree to which players are extended into the game space. Players navigate their avatar through these spaces, controlling movements that change the avatar's view and move it forward and backward. The movements are predetermined and technically speaking, a sequence of canned scenes. These scenes allow little variation or uniqueness in tempo: eight turns of 45 degrees to complete a circle and always the same eight views. The uniqueness and precision necessary to convince the players that these games are their experience are in the twitch. For all the coarseness and predictability of the avatar's movements there is immediate control at the tap of a finger on a key or on a mouse. This tap or twitch of the finger triggers the weaponry the avatar has at the time. The insignificance of tapping as a movement in everyday life or the "uselessness" of a twitch, which is considered less a body movement than an affliction, is the primary mode of communication between person and machinery or physical space and illusionary space. It is the marginal twitch that has successfully "tunneled" into the illusionary space of games like Doom and Marathon.

The insignificant activity of crossing a turnstile is a daily and unavoidable if not an unconscious and involuntary movement of many commuters. It is on the level of a twitch within one's daily activities. This twitch brings viewers of Maciej Wisniewski's Turnstile into the network. The artwork exist in two variations, one variation, Turnstile Part I is a physical/network installation that links a turnstile in a subway station to a turnstile in a gallery space. The second variation, Turnstile Part II is a network installation in which the internet and the physical location of Stadium are monitored for certain activity; Wisniewski creates a turnstile for electronic data. In Turnstile Part I, the gallery turnstile mimics the movement of the subway turnstile. The two turnstiles are connected via the internet and the transmitted data between the two is presented on Stadium. This data is untouched or unfiltered. This physical/network phase is of limited duration. Turnstile Part II is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) based server application and Java client applet that together cull live network 'objects' like lines of HTML code, text from web pages, chat and email and from Stadium itself, incoming and outgoing email, telephone calls, faxes and regular mail. In essence, virtual turnstiles are placed at various nodes within the internet, the Stadium network and physical space.

The physical/network installation of Turnstile Part I was first installed in New York City between a turnstile in the Times Square subway station and the Daniel Silverstein Gallery. The turnstile in the subway station was monitored and each time someone passed through it in either direction this movement was mirrored by the turnstile in the Silverstein gallery. The network transmission of the subway turnstile to the gallery turnstile was monitored and displayed at Stadium. The data was transmitted as a string of numbers conveying the turnstile's position to the nearest millimeter. This data was used by the turnstile in the Silverstein gallery to determine its position and was represented verbatim on the Stadium with the exception of a color change if the turnstile was entered or exited. Turnstile Part I addresses an issue of representation within a media and a technology that is abstracted and layered to the core. Turnstile is indexical and in fact it splits the index into its parallel contexts of the numerical string within the computer network and rotational spin of the turnstiles. The twitch of one turnstile is extended digitally to identically twitch another. It shares the indexicality and network functionality of voice over a telephone yet it pursues these issues with an aesthetic focus that raises the marginality and the ubiquity of the event of a turnstile's movement into a phenomenon and an aesthetic problem. Wisniewski chooses not to represent the movement of the turnstile as much as to transfer it to another place or context.

Eric Satie's Vexations, 1893, the repetition of a short piano piece 840 times, is an antecedent to his later Furniture Music. The prototypical serial piece and its ubiquity through repetition prefigures the twitch aesthetic of Turnstile. The performance of Vexations, depending on the tempo is between 14 to 28 hours in duration and usually involves several performers. The later Furniture Music, a collection of short phrases repeated an unspecified amount act as "articles of sonic decor". They resist and deny interpretation in presenting themselves as musical objects, passively present like furniture, Carrelage phonique (Acoustic Floor Tiling) or Tapisserie en fer forgee (Wrought Iron Tapestry). Above all, these works must not draw attention to themselves (it is often said that performers of Vexations find the piece mentally draining to perform because despite its repetition it is difficult to remember). Satie draws a parallel between the self-effacing and undeniability through repetition. Boredom through duration creates a certain state of mind between the performer and the listener, what Satie called "Serious Immobility". The duration of Vexations denies interpretation and expression. It denies the individual performer and that performer's representation or expression. It creates that experience for all participants of Vexations networked by the repetition of the "eighteen notes occupying thirteen crotchet beats (including a final quaver rest), and two harmonisations". The performers and listeners may come and go around the constant of the piano and the activity of hitting the keys of the piano. There is a distribution of the making of the artwork in Vexations. Also quite important, is the physical aspect of the work that must reduce the player to the mechanical and seemingly random tapping of the keys, a kind of twitch aesthetic.

Turnstile Part I and Part II share the distributed model of performance of Vexations, both rely on multiple "performers" in the subway station, the internet or viewers of the receiving turnstile in the gallery space or workers at Stadium. It joins multiple spaces and creates an event of communication that is expressed through the turn of a turnstile or fractured texts of the network. The space is conjoined as a corpus of multiple an unpredictable twitching.

Turnstile Part II turns to the network as a source but like "Vexations" the work dissolves into the event, the duration of the event and the 'space' of the network as defined by Turnstile Part II, where a telephone call to 411 from Stadium share proximity to rants in the "ALL FEMANAST SUCK!!" chat room. The ambient eavesdropping of Turnstile Part II extends the critical defining of an event and space of Satie's "Serious Immobility". The fractured syntax and combination of languages express in a twitch manner the space but it is one that can be disrupted further by 'clicking' on the a line of text to reveal its network source, however, 'click' the same line again and another source will be revealed showing that although this is a shared space it is not a static one.

Doom and Marathon are twitch aesthetics of another kind. They play on an obsession: to have the ability to remotely wreak violent chaos from a safe and all-seeing vantage point. Turnstile Part I and II share the games' obsession, to have a causal relationship that extends beyond the boundaries of our bodies. The turnstile or the text on the computer screen move like a mechanical marvel, shifting on their own, each as if guided by an invisible hand. The twitch aesthetics of Doom and Marathon are iconic and not indexical. The key or mouse is a trigger and the twitch aesthetics even play out in the actions of the victims who may twitch or writhe until they finally die. This difference masks similarities. Doom and Marathon share in Turnstile's functionality. Remove the layer of graphics and representation from Doom or Marathon and you will find Turnstile. Turnstile is the pixel-free twitch.

Ron Wakkary 1998