#fantasy_island is a wifi-enabled sculpture of the tropical island emoji. The work broadcasts media of tropical vacations scraped from the web, and also acts as a captive wifi portal. When connected, the piece pushes archived #fyre_fest tweets to the user’s phone allowing one to relive the high’s and lows of fyre fest.
I’m interested in the manufacturing of desire in the social media age, constructions of scam, scandal, and luxury colonialism present within contemporary tourist economies and the precarious state of “third-world” tropical places within a hypermodern global society that doesn’t necessarily always prioritize equitable cultural, economic, or ecological development.