The Aspiration

Superbude Wien 01/2024

These works were conceived during a 5-week long artist residency at Superbude Vienna. The installation in the Superbude lobby consists of three parts: two single-channel videos playing on loop, and a slowly and permanently rotating, angular grilled cheese sandwich. They all stem from the video game Sims 4, where my avatar lived in a replica of a Superbude room for the duration of the residency.

Simflammatory Essay
Single-channel video, 00:48
Arguably, life simulation games serve as a means of escape from reality – offering up complete control over actions, feelings, surroundings, relationships. Simflammatory Essay nods to Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays and appropriates their format and language by listing commands given to the avatars in the Sims 4. These commands take on a life of their own outside the game of their origin, telling the reader to attempt control of possible and impossible situations.

Room 329
Single-channel video, 03:10
Modelled after Room 329 on the third floor of Superbude Vienna, the character’s makeshift home offers views of a Prater rollercoaster, a bottle green tiled bathroom, and plenty of spaces to lie down on and ponder life. Over the course of 24 hours trapped in the room, melancholy, anger and lethargy are imposed on the Sim, projecting the anxieties of reality onto them and subjecting them to these commands without any free will of their own.

The Aspiration
3D print, acrylic, emulsion paint, servo motor, microcontroller
Adding something into a game is easy, taking anything tangible out, not so much. The rotating grilled cheese sandwich mimics the in-game motion of being able to be clicked, picked up, eaten – interacted with – while remaining stubbornly out of reach.