Selfie Toaster

The Selfie Toaster was launched in the mid-2010s for around 59 euros plus postage. The device toasts a previously taken self-portrait onto a slice of white bread.
The self-portrait emerged with the artist’s growing self-awareness as an autonomous subject during the Renaissance – and with it, the citizen emancipated themselves as an autonomous subject.
With the selfie toaster, the end of this emancipation is celebrated in the high mass of the free market economy: every citizen has the opportunity to symbolically internalise their self-image at the breakfast table.

The Selfie Toaster transforms a slice of toast into a communion wafer. The self becomes God in the flesh: anti-emancipatory, an undead being, condemned to consume itself in order to feel, in this rare moment, a sense of dominion – over itself – and beyond that: over the whole world.
That is the profit.
The radical self-exploitation of the capitalist subject of performance goes hand in hand with constant work on self-design and self-presentation, whilst waiting for some sort of profit.
The selfie is the icon of self-representation across the globe, in anticipation of some profit.

(Motif from the essay-performance WOUNDED WORLD #1: Imperatives of Identity, 2017-2024)