Artist statement
Riot Bingo is a playable Doomsday Clock with receipts.
There’s a feeling: that every month brings some new indication that the systems, institutions and assumptions holding society together are becoming slightly less reliable. Another democratic norm ignored. Another unprecedented weather event. Another corporation behaving appallingly. Another thing we were assured could never happen becoming normal.
But feelings are unreliable. So Riot Bingo attempts to keep score.
The project takes the form of a single 5×5 bingo card, shared by everyone and reset at the beginning of each month. Its squares describe recurring societal failure modes rather than individual kinds of news: Democratic Backsliding, Rotten Institutions, Corporate Psychopathy, State Capacity Failure, Rules Are For Other People…
Throughout the month, autonomous AI agents search the news for evidence. A scout discovers stories; a librarian groups and organises them; an editor interprets and scores them against a deliberately written editorial constitution. Every judgement remains traceable to its sources and open to human intervention.
Stories accumulate as receipts against the relevant squares. When the evidence becomes strong enough, the square is checked.
The board therefore isn't a catalogue of bad news. It is an attempt to identify patterns behind the news: the mechanisms by which trust, institutions, shared reality, democratic norms, human agency and the natural world can gradually deteriorate.
Some are spectacular. War, riots and environmental catastrophe announce themselves loudly. Others are mundane enough to become almost invisible: responsibility distributed until nobody is responsible; preventable tragedies met with ritual expressions of concern; workers treated as disposable costs; behaviour once considered scandalous becoming simply… how things are done.
It is deliberately difficult to get bingo in one month. A few bad stories aren’t enough. The mechanism of the game asks whether enough evidence has accumulated across enough domains with enough density to threaten the unthinkable BINGO. At the end of that month everything resets to zero, but not before the data is logged and tracked and added to the ongoing background analysis.
This makes Riot Bingo both measurement system and absurdist ritual. It takes an essentially emotional question — does it just feel as though everything is getting worse? — and subjects it to a disproportionately elaborate apparatus of taxonomies, evidence, scoring, AI agents and editorial judgement. The joke is that the whole thing is deadly serious.
Because underneath it is another question about how societal decline is perceived at all. Catastrophe rarely arrives labelled as catastrophe. Institutions erode incrementally. Exceptional behaviour becomes precedent, then convention, then background noise. Yesterday's scandal becomes tomorrow's normal and soon trust, social contract and the consent people hand over to governing systems becomes weakened, fragile and prone to breaking. At that point, you have to ask:
Is it time to take to the streets yet?
Riot Bingo will tell you when.