The game (the CD-ROM version) is a journey that you undertake to five different locations: Dar es Salaam, Mumbai (Bombay), Los Angeles, Windhoek and Bishek. Together, they form a symbolic map of the world, the map of the body that is Biophily. That body can also be taken as a map of the Internet. For everything seems to be a metaphor, virtual or real, robbed of a centre of observation. Biophily gives access to an oscillating world stumbling over its own ambivalence. Each destination in the game has its own themes and its own tasks. In this sense the five places are comparable to the levels of an 'ordinary' computer game. The 'love of life' of Los Angeles (with the title Eugen - Hire all my information) is aimed at making life even more fun and better. The attributes of this improvement are known to us all: cloning, fitness, enthusiastic Extropians who want to postpone death, the military/technological complex, the amusement industry and the neo-liberal Silicon Valley version of the Internet. The task is to 'design' your own identity in a biomedical laboratory and 'upload' it to the cosmos. To complete this task you have to navigate in a Quicktime VR environment and click on displayed attributes or on frozen figures that slip comments to you by means of subtitles. This question and answer game is perked up once in a while with animations that are charming in their clumsiness. For it is of course no ordinary laboratory; it is a hotchpotch of referrals and references that even if intended to be dead serious, remind one of the moving and witty surrealistic collages from the early twentieth century. But then with a new look and prose that seems to come from a Deleuze under the influence of a XTC, LSD and weed cocktail. When you are later back in the house you started from, you can print out a number of Desktop sculptures and paste them together on a rainy day. A worthy keepsake of your world travels. But is this then the only reward you get out of it?

Feuerstein wants of course to give you something serious in the pauses between your clicks. In a text by Rainer Fuchs that you can find on the Biophily site (and where you can also play a trimmed down version of the game), you can read that F. defines the domain of art as necessarily related to reality. But both have to be taken as constructs with their own genre of meaning and should be examined for connections. To do this well, the artist must address questions relating to mediatizing, virtual scenarios and the changing relationship to matter and the building bricks of life. Hence his interest in genetic manipulation and in the power of using technology to interfere at a deep level with what we used to call identity. If you have any questions after playing the game, the book can be ordered online: Biophily: better dead than read.

– Willem van Weelden