AES+F: The Feast of Trimalchio, a new-media artwork previously shown at the Venice Biennale 2009, is a large-scale digital video installation which retells Petronius’s epic poem from the Satyricon for a twenty-first century audience. Using the imagery of high fashion, cinema, lifestyle magazines and luxury design, The Feast of Trimalchio is an unrestrained indulgence of wealth and pleasure.
Set in a luxury hotel on an artificially constructed island paradise, the guests and staff change roles to live out their gastronomic and erotic fantasies. Despite the hotel’s endless pleasures, anxiety, inequality, and disaster continually threaten to destroy this very contemporary vision of paradise.
