Easy Ultra Fine is a free-standing interactive sculpture, featuring four custom keypads, four flatscreens, and a clay platform base. Visitors can punch codes into the keypads, which may instigate a random event on one of the four screens.
Stemming from research on emergent gameplay in open-world video games and inspired by red-herring collectables in point-and-click adventure games, Easy Ultra Fine centers on emotions gamers attach to virtual objects and invites introspection on their scarcity, uselessness, or potential. Easy Ultra Fine is an absurdist meditation on the value of virtual objects in a game environment. This value can be contingent on how an object is used, found, obtained, or for its promised potential, particularly when a player is given no explanation or use for an object, and may never be.
EASY ULTRA FINE
In video games, virtual objects (susceptible to digital decay as they are) become markers for shared experiences in our collective memory, just like any reproducible object has the potential to. Drawing connections between the ephemeral nature of virtual collectables, simulation and replication, the aesthetic abundance of convenience stores, and utopic As Seen on TV products, Easy Ultra Fine beckons broader questions—why do full inventories dissuade gamers from erasing a save file? Does a virtual object, just like any advertised product, present infinite potential, or immediate and irredeemable obsolescence?
