Qualities of American Individualism

Qualities of American Individualism, 2019

Interactivity is necessary to keep this piece running. When the application is started, the user finds themselves in a small moving elevator. A button on the side of the elevator will activate at random. When the user pushes the button, it will deactivate. After a random interval, the button will activate again. If the user does not push the button during its period of activation, the game will close. This creates a parasitic relationship between the user and the artwork, where the artwork requires the user to engage. There are only two states of being: existence and failure. I show this piece as an interactive portrait of the relationship between the individual and capitalism. In the context of contemporary America, the relationship between individual and capitalism is parasitic in nature. This piece highlights individualism's inevitable failure in a world where the metric for measuring success is production. Production is a metric that is incapable of success by design.

Built in Maya, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine 4 with sound editing in Audacity

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