Reality Used to be a Friend of Mine

The four-channel video installation “Reality Used to be a Friend of Mine” taps into video game and platform logic as ontological infrastructure shaping current day and age. The installation balances between internet cinema, camp aesthetics, gameplay videos, warfare imagery and 3D renders. It heavily draws from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” (1957), recontextualizing its excerpts of technology descriptions for today’s techno-feudal times. One of the videos can be recognized as a data center tour, edited, in the process turning the guide in the video into a three-dimensional Sims puppet. The remaining videos showcase a music video and a karaoke. While the real or rather hyper-real cornered dancer in the music video jigs among explosions; the singer recites the YouTube’s superstar MrBeast manifesto. In its totality, the installation constructs a complex environment, overstimulated with color and sound; it’s a recognisable reflection of life infused with technology.