Cells do fuck, behind our backs. Their mating is coded, their plugs and wires are in plain sight. Smooth, frictionless. Ice cream so good. Yes yes yes. Ice cream so good, moan TikTok NPC streamers these days—non-player characters that have always dwelled, half-alive, behind our backs. They moan in exchange for nonexistent ice cream cones, they become artificially intelligent, they fuck with us. “Live your dream,” says a keyring stuck to one of Mimosa Echard’s psychotic compositions on canvas. It sits close to a remote control. A soft porn blonde smiles at us. Coins and bills frame the scene, a butterfly flaps its wings to sell “coaching”—it is a business card.

Should we quit the game, get off the stream? “Patches can reduce the radiation rate by more than 99.99 percent,” says a leaflet in another of Mimosa’s pictures. She covered monumental canvases with anti-radiation fabric, she glued pills and blister packs all over her surfaces. We do need some kind of cure, some kind of shielding from detrimental waves. Cells get tired.

But they are wired—there is no outside of the wave game, there is no such thing as non-mediation. We have never desired things themselves anyhow. We desire the surplus of things, psychoanalysts say. We enjoy things for what they represent, not for what they are; we want things before they happen (Vorfreude), as long as they feel out of reach. This is the basic logic of economics, of algorithmic feeds, stimulation without satiation. But can surplus be something else? Can mediation make space for an excess of meaning? Something always leaks from within the grid. A satiation that happens in a background we didn’t know we could play in.

There is a postcard of Lascaux in one of Mimosa’s pictures, among the pills, the money, the plugs. This, said Georges Bataille, is a cavern that will never cease to astound. It corresponds to the yearning for the unhoped-for, the first miracle. Pistils leak out of Mimosa’s cave, as well as plastic eggs. The web is made of silk. The anti-radiation grids may end up breeding a new stock set of scripts, if we let our non-players fuck in the surplus that exists behind us.

Text by Isabella Zamboni