Slot Waste is an exhibition of three game and simulation works by Los Angeles-based artist, Vinny Roca. With common threads of the absurd, the unintelligible, and the processual, each work of Slot Waste presents moments of eerie transformation, creating weird ecologies that both invite and implicate players in their strange productions. Through these works, Roca looks toward the game engine as a system to make sense of the contemporary crossings of labor, production, and ritual.

My Easy Shaker Yoke Face (2020) is an absurdist computer game that plays with the historical lineage of the American Shaker tradition. Taking and expanding upon the Shaker's understanding of labor and religion, best summarized in the common Shaker phrase "Hands to Work, Hearts to God," My Easy Shaker Yoke Face attempts to work through the relationship between contemplation, transformation, and labor. Players navigate a room filled with absurd objects and machines attempting to understand which machines and objects transform each other. As players gain knowledge of the system, the process of creation and transformation repeats until the player successfully makes a sculptural portrait in the center of the room.

Come Away With Me (2023) is a real-time simulation of an ambiguous ritual. In the midst of a seemingly vast desert storm, thirteen pigs emerge one by one from a semi-truck, each carrying a speaker playing a song from the 2002 Nora Jones album, from which the work takes its name. Each pig dances separately to their own music before joining together in a communal cacophonous procession. Examining ideas of indecipherable rituals and inaccessible intelligence, the work presents an experience of transfiguration through repetition. Although an eerie joy is palpable throughout the duration of the work, the pigs' unending labor casts an ominous tone over the ritualistic procession.

Slot Waste (2024) is an experimental video game that articulates a lengthy, absurdist Rube Goldberg-like production process. The fantastically grotesque creatures that populate the game are both autonomous and alive, yet their existences remain inextricably tied to the process of production. Centering the absurdist objective of total productivity, all waste, including the excretions and defecations of the various beings within the game, is continuously transformed into raw material. When playing Slot Waste, the ambiguity between life and death, waste and product, repulsion and desire, compels the player to interact with the machine to become part of the elliptical production process itself. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Vinny Roca is a game maker, artist, and graduate student at UCLA DMA.