Bunny’s Big Adventure
3 minutes 8 seconds
2023
Monologue by Siete Seven 7 (@ sietesays)
The discourse around simulation theories has shifted since 2003 when Nick Bostrom raised the question in Philosophical Quarterly, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?”
What started out as ideas of posthuman civilizations running simulations of evolutionary history has twisted into a pseudo spiritual collage that resembles both ideas of reincarnation and video games.
Muses of whether or not we live in a simulation often resemble the debate of predetermination or free will. Often leaving one with an overwhelming feeling of: Does it matter? Would it change how you act? Would it change how you feel about your life?
Bunny’s Big Adventure is a road trip through a simulation unraveling.
TEXT BY MARLENA VON WEDEL
Bailey Keogh (Phoenix/USA) creates videos, performances and environments that explore the
merging of digital and physical spheres in our lives.
Keogh presents a short video sequence in which we follow the floating character Bunny through a
model-like desert. Bunny’s Big Adventure is based on the monologue of a post by user Siete Seven 7,
a TikTok account with several thousand followers. User Siete Seven 7 is part of an online community
that shares and deepens opinions about simulation theories. In the voice-over of the video, we hear
their voice electronically alienated. It sketches the idea that our reality is actually a computer
simulation of an evolutionary story carried out by a post-human civilisation.
Bunny’s Big Adventure is a road trip through a dissolving simulation. A gradient as a horizon stretched
into infinity and a barren desert landscape serve as a mise-en-scene. The artist herself reports that
the artistically often ‘dreaded blank page’, for her personally begins per default with the backdrop of
her childhood home - the semi-desert climate of Arizona, where she grew up.
Keogh, like a kind of amateur anthropologist, explores the internet, driven by a fascination with
subcultures and fandom obsessions as the formation of modern human relationships and
community. The artist is not on the outside collecting artefacts like an ordinary scientist, she is
herself part of these communities she studies. Involved as much as incredulously observant, she
humbly pauses in front of this captivating backdrop to then immerse herself fully. Like the circles in a
venn diagram, her artistic practice evolves in the intersections of technology, spirituality and society.
