Dear Player,

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Back then–was it five years ago already, or a very long time before that? When you think of it your throat goes scratchy.

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This is the story of Alexandra and Elias and others. Fortunately you and I aren’t among them; we have not yet been touched by time, and the past still looks like the future. We sit in smoke-filled, raucous internet cafés, peering at a sliver of a distant world through pirated video games; through the dusty screen everything is a blur. Loading… 99% loaded… loading failed. Or we pull on shoe covers and enter the sanctified computer classroom at high school, take the grey mouse with a boiled egg tucked beneath its scroll wheel, and under strict, precise instructions we build our very first, utterly graceless web page. Everything must be spotless–just like so many things we would later encounter in our life.

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The essential point is to sit down–on this chair or that chair, similar but never the same. Sit down and click on a shard. You Lose. Keep clicking, make choices, even if the one who truly makes the choice is never you yourself, until you escape, or until the part of you that occupies those pixels escapes. You Win. Yet you feel some oscillation here and there.

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Liu Guangli lives in Paris. He never witnessed what happened in America–he must have learned to tell lies at some point. He tells these stories to Al models, and the models docilely dress them up a little prettier. He has made many moving images before–some authentic, some less so–he records, he mocks, he speculates. Now at 4b(3) he has decided to do something else, works that scramble together our situation: united, and taut.

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If truth has never truly existed in the public sphere, welcome to the 4b(3) Mental Health Centre. Please choose a machine to extract your memories. Do not be afraid — it is warm here. After all, the past is past, isn’t it?

 

4b(3)