What Now? a game on waiting and uncertainty (2026)

The work holds two forms of powerlessness in superposition, never quite touching. The first is the suspension of a body within a day, deprived of agency over the duration of its own waiting. But what distinguishes one wait from another is not how long it lasts, but what one is allowed to know while waiting. Two bodies may inhabit the same duration and yet experience entirely different temporalities: one knows when the wait will end, the other does not. Power operates here through the unequal distribution of certainty, through who is given access to information and who is left in the dark.

What is purchased when waiting can be escaped is therefore not time itself. The alternative still takes time. What is purchased is knowledge: the ability to know, predict, and orient oneself within that duration. Money does not necessarily make one wait less. It makes one wait informed.

The second form of powerlessness enters through the device in the hand, reached for precisely to escape the first. It offers another kind of waiting: the continuous, unresolved temporality of world events, unfolding without a horizon that can be known, controlled, or purchased. Where the first uncertainty can be made legible through economic power, this one cannot.

The work does not resolve either condition. It offers no strategy for escaping them. The viewer is left between two forms of waiting: one in which certainty can be purchased, and another in which it cannot. In both, the fundamental condition remains the same: being subject to a duration over which one has no control.