Nomad Codes

middle of Gak. We’re going to wrap it around. I’m holding it.” She waits a minute and then unfurls the glop. “It melted a little and the water sorta sank into it.” She probes the surface with her finger. “Ewwww!”

    In A Thousand Plateaus , the French theorists Deleuze and Guattari’s technical manual of conceptual mutation, the authors direct our attention towards the importance of “destratified, deterritorialized matter.” This mode of matter “is not to be confused either with an intelligible, formal essentiality or a sensible, formed and perceived, thinghood.” Destratified matter is always deforming, passing to a limit, changing state between solid and liquid. Such matter propagates itself through whatD&Gcall “the machinic phylum,” a nomadic space that is “matter in movement, in flux, in variation.”
    D & G were anticipating Gak. For Gak, too, is nothing less than a plastic machine through which matter probes its own fluid possibilities. While it vaguely resembles fake vomit, Gak cares nothing for simulacra or the easy metaphors of Slime, whose name and trash-can packaging gave the substance a specific identity. Gak is metamatter, a gooey question mark, an ontological murk. It is at once the primal ooze and the apocalyptic sci-fi blob. We can only impose ourselves on it so much, after which point we can only follow its flows (or its oozes).
    Kids dig this because Gak, like Warner Bros. cartoons, suggests that the laws that govern physical reality are malleable. This accounts for the experimental dimension of so much Gak play, for Gak incites an exploratory urge that combines the joy of mud puddles with the scientist’s clinical investigations. One of Gak’s most popular features—the noises it makes when you cram your fingers into a full splat—was discovered by kids, not by Mattel. Now the most-asked question on the company’s 800 number is how to make Gak fart.
    Gak also conjures up weird science because the stuff looks like it crawled out of a Chernobyl swamp or a galactic meteorite. And, according to a Scientific American article, researchers are beginning to develop “intelligent gels”—polymer substances that shrink and expand in response to specific changes in their environment with the precision of machines, converting chemical energy into mechanical work. Gak, too, is a product of science, but of a very peculiar sort. Whereas goofy foods like Gummy Bears, Jell-O, bubblegum, and marshmallows share Gak’s aesthetic, and Nickelodeon’s original Gak was reportedly a kind of rancid pudding, Gak is not a food but a lab compound. Besides designer drugs, Gak is one of the few substances on earth invented by scientists driven neither by the joys of pure research or strict utilitarian goals (excluding the bottom line, that is). Mattel’s chemists were driven by the search for fun.
    Not surprisingly, the company is being very James Bond about Gak’s chemical composition, and their in-house chemists are shrouded in secrecy. But independent research reveals that Gak is composed primarily of acrylic (a thickener which holds Gak’s considerable moisture inside) and silicone (which accounts for the stuff’s airtight stretchiness as well as, presumably, its jiggle). Mattel spokesmen will not confirm this information but did admit that Gak’s chilly feel—especially noticeable when the stuff is stretched across the room—was due to evaporation. Though company officials claim that what they call “those amazing little crystals” are an inconsequential by-product of Gak’s principle elements, the possibilities that Gak is powered by the resonant frequencies of those crystals cannot be dismissed out of hand.
    The most significant thing about Gak’s composition is that, like us, the stuff is made up mostly of water—about 80 percent. This sets up a powerful tactile empathy between our bodies and Gak. “It’s one of the things that makes it feel so alive,” says Mattel’s John Handy. More importantly, it makes us feel a little like Gak. Not that we’re violet (or green or orange) or smell like finger paints, but that our bodies, too, are in some mysterious way as malleable as a T2 morph. Perhaps this corporeal empathy explains an aspect of Gak that is almost unique among toys: boys and girls play with the stuff in identical fashion. It seems as if Gak catalyzes a body that eludes strict codes like gender. While this body is in some sense an infantile corpus of pure