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# One Pigeon Instead of Every Clock [Podcast]
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/one-pigeon-instead-of-every-clock-podcast/
- Published: 2026-09-05T18:42:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T18:42:27.000Z
- Description: An arcade cabinet that writes a stranger’s life, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour clock, and a pigeon romance rebuilt after its map switched off.
- Author: Jamin Warren
- Tags: Podcast, Danny Snelson, TOMO KIHARA, CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, Wristwork, Pigeon: A Love Story, Distraction, artificial intelligence, arcade, Tokyo, Paris, Film, #slideshow

I open with Tomo Kihara, a Tokyo designer who has built an arcade cabinet that nobody scripted, and put a question to Danny Snelson that runs through the whole hour: what happens to authorship when the designer does not know the outcome either? The through line for this cycle is work built to outlast the thing it was made on.

Kihara’s *What Plays You? Game of Possible Lives* is a cabinet running a language model locally, generating a statistically plausible Japanese life out of census data. You steer that person through their decisions and you get exactly one rewind. Danny puts the authorship problem in a much longer line, back through Dada and the constraint-based writing of the 1960s, where the artist produces a set of rules that might themselves be the work. The only new thing here is that one of the players is a large language model. 

But what about the venue? The cabinet has travelled from the museum to a hotel lobby, so the people playing it are the ones passing through hotels, airports and train stations rather than the ones who chose to visit a museum. Danny lands on Marc Augé’s non-places, and on the fact that a census is a state instrument, which puts a game about ordinary lives in exactly the spaces where ordinary life is watched most closely.

Then [Christian Marclay’s *The Clock*](https://www.killscreen.com/christian-marclay-the-clock-lacma/), which I went to see in Los Angeles. Twenty-four hours, every minute cut from a different film, synchronized to the time on your own watch. It is ludic without containing a single game mechanic. You watch it hunting, and Danny calls it the ultimate collectathon on both sides at once: whoever had to find a usable clip for all 1,440 minutes, and the viewer collecting them back one at a time. It also could not be made this way now. The labor is the work, and a model asked to find every clock would dissolve it.

To close, Wristwork’s *Pigeon: A Love Story*, where you are a pigeon crossing London, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Amsterdam looking for one specific other bird. The commercial map service it ran on was switched off, so they rebuilt it on open map data, which is the same durability question in a different key. Danny reads it as the inverse of *The Clock*: one pigeon instead of every clock. 

Then to Paris, where the events company Diversion marked ten years with an exhibition and the collective at distraction.fun filled it with games. That sends us into what makes a game legible as coming from a place at all, and Danny’s counterexample is *Stray*, a deeply French game whose every visible marker points at Hong Kong.

## Links

- [My feature on Tomo Kihara, who built a cabinet nobody scripted](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/)
- [Ryan Bradley on Keita Takahashi and the scoreless game](https://www.killscreen.com/the-young-and-the-scoreless-baby-gamers/)
- [Wristwork rebuilt its dead pigeon romance on open maps](https://www.killscreen.com/wristwork-rebuilt-its-dead-pigeon-romance-on-open-maps/)
- [A game tower crowned Diversion’s tenth anniversary in Paris](https://www.killscreen.com/a-game-tower-crowned-diversions-tenth-anniversary-in-paris/)
- [Roppongi Crossing 2025 at the Mori Art Museum](https://www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/roppongicrossing2025/02/index.html?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Tomo Kihara](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/about.html?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Christian Marclay, The Clock](https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/christian-marclay-clock?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Wristwork, Pigeon: A Love Story](https://www.wristwork.com/pigeon?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Distraction](https://distraction.fun/?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Jonathan Coryn, Player Non Player](https://corjn.com/playernonplayer?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Nicolai Troshinsky, Loop Raccord](https://www.troshinsky.com/loopraccord.html?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Miguel Sicart, Playing Software](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047722/playing-software/?ref=killscreen.com)
- [Danny Snelson](https://dss-edit.com/?ref=killscreen.com)

## Corrections

- I name Tomo Kihara’s studio as Gift Ten Industries. His studio is Other Rules. Gift Ten Industry is a separate Tokyo game company.
- Danny attributes *Death 24x a Second* to Leslie Thornton. The book is by Laura Mulvey. Leslie Thornton is a different filmmaker.
- I refer to a game called Loop Record by Nikolai Trishinsky. It is *Loop Raccord*, by Nicolai Troshinsky.
- I describe Robert Redford in *The Natural* hitting a home run into the clock at Wrigley Field and exploding it. Those are two different shots. He shatters the scoreboard clock at Wrigley earlier in the film, and the famous exploding home run at the end hits the stadium light towers.
- The birthday problem needs 23 people for a better-than-even chance of a shared birthday, not 25.

*Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by* [*Nick Sylvester*](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*.*