Flesh Prison Manifest (2021)
30-second excerpt, 3:43 minutes, single-channel animation.
Flesh Prison Manifest is a digital animation that datamoshes footage of The Sims (2000), a lo-fi life simulation computer game, and carnalizes its pixels to signify an abjection: a muddy, repulsive border where the self meets the impossibility of digital embodiment. The animation centers around a female avatar; her form is reduced to its surface and becomes subsumed into the game’s home environment. Walls take on the appearance of skin, their uncertain depths collapsing and squirming over a muculent soundtrack. Through impressionistic glitch techniques, the structured void of the digital domain becomes enmeshed with gelatinous textures, creating a perceptual space where computer detritus is troubled by tactility. The paradox of a fleshy pixel becomes a symbol of where the self locates itself in the ambiguous oppositions of corporeal/representational. As the avatar reconstructs itself with human substrate, a fallacy emerges in the digital-physical union. The abject manifests as a mutant cadaver, immortal in its virtual life state – an impossible object.
Simulate/Dissociate (2019)
30-second excerpt, 3:46 minutes, single-channel animation.
Simulate/Dissociate delineates a room in which the digital native confronts the computer in an attempt to resolve their technostress. The room is designed to recreate the affect of an early computer, incorporating visual assets from The Sims (2000), a life simulation computer game. It is a means to reclaim a relationship with the computer, and reconnect with the past self; before mass data mining, before continuous social interaction, and before the walls between the screen and “reality” thinned to invisibility.