The Bald Altuus

THE BAL ALTUUS is an auto-fiction portrait of a Romanian immigrant family settling in the United States in the 1980’s presented as an infinitely-generative live simulation inside a game engine. Staged as an American TV sitcom on endless repeat, stock digital avatars perform increasingly dysfunctional variations on the family drama while haunted by memories of the Ceaușescu regime.

The project explores the potential of loops and repetition to act as both narrative material and formal structure: modular scenes of two or more characters act as containers in which different aspects of dramatic conflict are unpacked, in endless variation. The characters that inhabit this world have a deliberate, agonizing everybody-ness about them. While they stand for specific historical figures, they are nevertheless imbued with an allegorical sense of humans as cogs inside systems of power much larger than themselves. They speak in a made-up language called Românglish, a blending of English with Romanian linguistic morphologies, that offers access to partial, but not full meaning of what is being expressed. Their awkward gestures and linguistic brokenness point to an invisible, systemic dysfunction.

Inspired by Romanian playwright Eugen Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano," which has been staged continuously in Paris since 1957, THE BALD ALTUUS reinterprets Ionesco's concept of the "anti-play" within a game engine environment. Its looping structures form a contemporary portrait of agency within the family, the political, and the digital technologies that permeate every aspect of society.