TILT

Text by Daniel Moreno Roldán

A surfer has died in my town. He was 18 years old; he went out to catch waves on an autumn storm day. Quite a tragedy. A wave that was far too big tumbled him, and he never came back out of the sea. Underwater, the most dangerous thing is becoming disoriented and losing your sense of which way is up and which way is down. Not knowing which direction to swim. Watching the path of the bubbles is the trick. They always rise; they never lose their axis.

What little I know about this exhibition, for now, is just its title. Pere called me on the phone to ask me to write the exhibition text, and he didn’t want to tell me much more. However strange or cryptic this title may seem, at least in the context of a painting exhibition, I immediately recognized the word. I visualized it as Pere pronounced it to me for the first time, blinded by that intense orange light flickering over a dot-matrix screen.

In my town, as far as I know, there is only one bar left with an arcade machine. A pinball machine based on the first Shrek movie. It now costs 1€ per game.

When I started playing, I lost almost immediately. As soon as I released the launcher spring, the metal ball went straight into the drain. The only thing I knew to do, in an attempt to stop it, was to shake the machine. Lift it slightly to tilt its surface and redirect the ball’s path. The “tilt” error appeared on the screen, and I lost automatically. The bar regulars scolded me: you don’t touch the machine, that’s cheating, it’s very old and must be taken care of because it’s a relic and could be sold for a lot of money on Wallapop. I had to leave the bar.

In other games, like chess or poker, being “on tilt” refers to a mental state of frustration that leads the player to make bad decisions. To play emotionally unhinged, without clarity, impulsively, making mistakes they normally wouldn’t. Almost always after a bad streak or a bad hit. One way or another, you end up losing your sense of direction.

The pinball machine, however, always has a clear vertical axis relative to the ground. Inside, there is a pendulum with a weight hanging from a metal rod. The rod hangs inside a ring, also metal, which is fixed. When the machine tilts and the pendulum moves, the rod touches the ring and closes an electric circuit that triggers the “tilt” error.

It’s the machine that tells you that you are “on tilt,” that you’ve gotten frustrated and nervous  and that this isn’t how you play. Either way, 1€ lost.

There used to be a trick to play for free: you drilled a hole in a coin and tied a string to it. That way, when the game ended, you pulled on the string and got the coin back. But the trick no longer works; the machines won’t be fooled anymore. In any case, beyond the inevitably lost euro, what distressed me most was the inquisitorial scolding from the bar regulars.

We are people who live in houses with shutters on the windows. We need to be able to lower them and hide what we do inside, out of fear that others will see what we do wrong. In case it looks like we’re cheating at something and someone tells on us. But, perhaps because of the growing nostalgia some people seem to feel for puritan ethics, few people close their shutters anymore. We’re nervous and frustrated, and suddenly some poor devil feels good when there are rules and they’re clear, and wants everyone to follow them. And it turns out they’re not a poor devil at all, but a crowd of devils who feel most at ease when the climate is authoritarian. And they might even end up reporting you for shaking the pinball machine too hard. You triggered “tilt”! You can’t keep playing! The game is over!

The game is ending, and the world is in ruins. Buildings are swaying and pavements are lifting. A great wave is approaching that intends to drown us all. The “tilt” error is flashing nonstop on the screen of the Shrek pinball machine in my town’s bar, even though no one is playing. The bar is half-collapsed, the floor is no longer level, and the pinball machine is permanently tilted. And faced with this, nervous and frustrated people become aggressive and want to straighten things out. This is dangerous. As poker or chess players know well, the distance between frustration and stupidity is very small. And being stupid can lead you to do horrible  things.

After the phone conversation with Pere, when he invited me to write this text and gave me hints about the subject of his exhibition, Tilt, what stayed with me was that it would be a reflection on stupidity and fascism. A kind of pictorial commentary on human foolishness in times of desperation.

I’m not entirely sure I’ve talked about those topics here, but I hope that, somehow, as you read  and tilted your head, or tilted the page to read the half-fallen paragraphs, you were able to see  which way the bubbles float.