title: Fun Times with Weapons

Medium: monitor, joystick, buttons, electronics, cardboard boxes and scrap wood

Description: Pather and Johnston have built an arcade-style machine designed to induce rage: a game that actively resists the player. Its joystick pushes against your movements, the buttons press themselves, and the machine deliberately sabotages your control. Within the game’s narrative, the machine has a consciousness that doesn’t want you to win; it sits at the bottom of the leaderboard, and if you surpass its score, it will be overwritten and “die.” This creates an existential struggle in which the machine fights for its own survival. The piece forms part of a larger series imagining a future where governments attempted digital immortality, leaving behind malfunctioning machines like this one—remnants of failed efforts to preserve human consciousness.

bio

Pather and Johnston are an artistic duo exploring human-machine collaboration. Their work examines the behaviours and relationships formed between machines and the people who interact with them. Together, they create interactive artworks that investigate how interfaces shape and alter reality, as well as the dynamic between hardware and software, focusing on systems and control.

A recurring theme in their work is the friction between human intention and mechanical resistance. They have recently been looking at how the relationship between hardware and software, and the expectations we put on them, can be used to induce rage within humans. Through game systems that actively work against the player and machines that subvert expected behaviours, their practice explores frustration, sabotage, and the collaborative nature of digital spaces. Drawing from speculative fiction and posthuman theory, their work reflects on how emerging technologies reinforce or disrupt existing power dynamics