276. Meeple Circus (Meeple Zircus)
275. Meeple Circus (Meeple Zirkus), 2026, Öl auf Leinwand, 20 × 15cm
This is a painting of the board game Meeple Circus. In the game you participate in a circus. You have to arrange various figurines into a tower in a short amount of time marked out by the soundtrack. More points are awarded to greater feats of balance. After I played it, I painted it. After I painted it I started to see myself in the meeple who struggles to hold up the elephant. The figure is undeterred by the impossibility of the task, not to mention the absurdity of the task, which only we can see from the outside. There, inside his tower, he is like Werner Herzog’s character Fitzcaraldo who tries to pull a ship over a mountain, naïve and tragic.
On the other hand, if somebody gave me this painting and asked me to write something about it I would probably think about how the current obsession with AI reminds me of the story of the tower of Babel. I say this because I was recently listening to The Literature and History Podcast by Doug Metzger and it has a very interesting episode specifically on how the Cuneiform writing system of the ancient world promised to unite people but ultimately failed to do so.
Cuneiform began in the ancient world and, written by pressing a pointed stick into wet clay, it was fairly easily learned and became widespread over several centuries as an official language. The Podcast explains that it could easily have emerged as the only writing systems that humans would need but it’s downfall nonetheless came about. It’s replacement with simplified alphabets used to write on parchment, as well as various religious and political pressures confined it to the recycle bin of history.
Metzger speculates that it sounds like the story of Cuneiform could be what is retold encoded in the tower of Babel story from Genesis in the Hebrew bible. Cuneiform promised to unify different people through language but failed. The Tower of Babel story is about early humankind trying to organize itself into a massive structure tall enough to reach the heavens. God confuses humankind’s speech however, so people can no longer understand one another and their building site, much like many building sites in Germany today, remained in disarray.
Today the ubiquitous ‘large language model’ that promises a new world also seems to be a building site that is sliding into disarray. And so it comes to pass that I realize that not only am I a meeple, a meeple in a circus, but indeed to be human is to be meeple. I think therefore I meeple. I meeple therefore I am.
