The four-channel video installation “Reality Used to be a Friend of Mine” by Arnas Rasim taps into video game and platform logic as ontological infrastructure shaping today’s day and age. Drawing from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), the installation recontextualizes its take on technology for today’s techno-feudal times. Among what can only be described as internet cinema and notes on camp, scenes of gameplay and warfare are accompanied by a data center tour, guided by a three-dimensional Sims puppet. There's also a music video and a karaoke. While the hyper-real dancer jigs among explosions, the singer recites the YouTube superstar’s MrBeast’s manifesto. In its totality, the installation constructs a complex environment, overstimulated with colour and sound— a reflection on life infused with technology.
The complementary three-part essay book documents the research that grounds the work in theory. It deems early games situated on the platform as the breeding ground for their now extractivist character. MrBeast is uncovered as just another handy-man stuck in a metric-driving and receiving cycle. Ultimately, the essay ponders on the possibility of reality turning into a game, optimised and smooth.
The design of the publication follows this same absurd logic. Memes and gameplay grabs point back to the context that spawned it, while the microtypography enacts the feudal interventions of the platforms it describes. The publication’s dimensions mirror those of a phone screen, but unfolded, they expose the consequent boxification of human experience as such.