While most of us can’t say that our claim to fame is beating Steve Wozniak at something, Rutherford Chang ’02 has achieved this distinction. As a Guardian article last month reported, he’s the second best Tetris player in the world – four places ahead of Wozniak with a high score of 614,094.
But Chang doesn’t play Tetris for mere procrastinating pleasure; as a visual and performance artist, he views the strategy of Tetris as mirroring the corporate workplace where repetition and competition dominate (as he told The Guardian): “Every 10 lines you complete, you advance one level and the pieces fall faster,” he says. “Eventually they fall so fast that you can’t keep up and you die… You can’t ever beat the game. It’s about squeezing in as much perfection as possible in this limited time before your inevitable death.”
If his Tetris skills and creative capitalist critique weren’t enough, Chang made news back in 2013 as the primary collector of first pressings of The Beatles’s The White Album. His installation “We Buy White Albums” displayed 100 of the staggering 1,394 copies he now owns. I decided I’d have to investigate Chang’s awesomeness further so I hit him up for a quick chat about Tetris, The White Album, and his art. Hit the jump for our interview on all things Rutherford.
