Ridge Racer: Deleuze Edition

2025

A hack of the PlayStation game Ridge Racer (Namco, 1994), Ridge Racer : Deleuze Edition replaces the original music with recordings of Gilles Deleuze's lectures at Paris 8 University. The textures and objects in the game become vehicles for his concepts, Rhizome and Body Without Organs, creating a collision between the colourful arcade game of the 1990s and French theory of the 1970s. But this diversion is haunted: in the visual glitches and sound interference, another presence manifests itself, Jacques Derrida and his notion of hauntology.

The game goes haywire, splits in two, as if crossed by its own spectres.

Between pop culture and philosophy, Ridge Racer: Deleuze Edition revisits a practice from the 1990s, replacing the game's CD with its own music to turn it into a theoretical-spectral experience. The console becomes a haunted machine: Deleuze races at full speed, Derrida scrambles the track, and the player finds themselves at the wheel of a stream of consciousness that has become a ghost.