Trust is an installation comprised of a center work and several satellite pieces. At the core, a hand-built and rendered mock arcade machine, running on hacked programming. An LCD screen on the arcade control panel informs viewers that “1 Fingerprint = 1 Credit” and directs one to place a finger on the sensor below to enroll a print. Doing so inserts a credit into the machine, and the game can be played to fruition. Previously used fingerprints are recognized and may not be used again.

The work uses allusions and parity with so-called "Pac-man Fever" a 1981-1982 craze for arcades resulting in a merchandising explosion. In 1980, buoyed by a Japanese manufacturing boom, the U.S. underwent an imported arcade machine fanaticism.  After Pac-man's North American release in 1981, Pac-man merchandising alone reached over $1 billion dollars in revenue by 1982, and led to single "Pac-man Fever" by Buckner & Garcia reaching no. 9 on the Billboard music charts.

The satellite pieces of Trust are a collection of merchandise, some hand-rendered, some machine-made (just as the arcade machine’s aesthetics are a mixture of hand-painted and machined.) The satellite pieces form a parafiction - an invented narrative of “Trust Fever” - a consumer craze and frenzied passion for the game.  Comprised of a t-shirt, a hand-drawn mug, and a pressed vinyl recording of song “Trust Fever”, the merchandise probes the manner in which capitalism lends legitimacy and codifies objects between art and commercial goods. This, simultaneous with the arcade machine probing social media exchanges of privacy for entertainment and implicit consent in online interactions, suggests a current craze and economic shift brought by commodification of personal data.

Thus, “Trust” encompasses four pieces in its installation -
Trust - 2021 - Wood, acrylic, paint, fingerprint sensor, electronics
Trust Fever - 2021 - Pressed vinyl recording and paper sleeve
Trust Mug - 2021 - Ceramic, Marker
Trust T-Shirt - 2021 - Cloth