Daniel Klass Beckwith
speedrunning
27 October - 17 December 2017
Opening - Friday, 27 October 2017, 7-9 pm
M 2 3 Project Room
209 Morgan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11237
Press Release
Checklist
Purchase Speedrunning: Final Ontology of Man
Daniel Klaas Beckwith theorizes a terminal point of human progress. In a post human chorus, motorized objects ominously harmonize amid a leering field of anthropomorphized debris. Vehicles and appliances appear to have developed a singular melodic voice, and discarded bags and refuse take ambiguously threatening shapes. Betraying the appearance of entropy, this is a depiction of a system whose efficiency is not only a tendency, but is approaching a limit.
“Speedrunning” is a niche genre of video gaming subculture in which a player attempts to beat or end a game as fast as possible, honing a cybernetic mastery of the coded system until it is understood at a more fundamental state; reaching beyond the visible screen of information and manipulating invisible truths. Logically centering around the eponymously titled article excerpt, speedrunning posits that ours is a world of fiction, built of useful misunderstanding and structural exploitation; refined by a language designed to dissect and control the chaos of nature.
The development of human language as a self-organizing structure churns an inevitable flow of efficiencies, and as survival is abstracted and exploited the ultimate product of progress reveals itself to be: entertainment. Distorting the diegetic frame by proving entertainment itself as a structure to exploit, the action of the speedrunner reveals the paradox of progress: as the length of the speedrun approaches zero, as when communication within any system approaches perfection, a moment of omniscient singularity appears in which distinctions no longer exist and only languageless static remains.
Daniel Klaas Beckwith
artifacts left by a vanishing body, 2017 (moped)
excerpt: composition in four parts of idling motors and appliances
TRT: 0:23