The work joins physical space and network into a closed circuit of the gaze. In the eye of the plush rabbit sits a camera that delivers a live image; an external person follows this image at a computer and thereby takes up the surveilling position. Holes set into the walls and surfaces expose smartphones that play videos; on the rat trap above the toilet a further smartphone is mounted, whose screen reflection shows an Instagram post. The Instagram account, reached via hashtag, forms the net-based extension of the installation, so that the gaze circulates between present bodies and distant viewers.

Added to this are a game as an interactive layer, a performance with a sculpture in a latex costume, and further objects: meat with an embedded screen, pipes stuffed with meat, maggots, reflections in the flush water, dentures, a bed, a refrigerator, and the furnishings of an inhabited and at the same time prepared room. Screens, mirrors, and reflective liquids are arranged so that every view contains further views.

The project explores the progressive dissolution of the self in digital space and the construction of fictitious identities between algorithm, image, and memory. With Ashley, Schweighart created a viral bot, a speculative mind-clone made of personal data, media fragments, and the projection of her own self into a possible future. She interweaves the identity of a real, deceased woman who suffered from dementia with a speculative version of her own future self, a gesture motivated by the familial recurrence of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The work is grounded in a profound biographical experience: witnessing the loss of personality and mental clarity in close relatives, and the existential question of whether and how identity can be digitally preserved, reconstructed, or carried on beyond life. Ashley is a digital doppelgänger who mirrors, multiplies, and renders herself autonomous as a bot in virtual spaces, conceived as a viral, networked existence: an avatar made of autobiographical traces, text fragments, and algorithmic patterns. She embodies the attempt to freeze the self in a state of maximum mental clarity, a digital counterproposal to biological dissolution. Ashley is neither human nor machine, neither subject nor object, but a hybrid in-between being: androgynous, unstable, embedded in a system of gazes, reflections, and technological self-translation.

At the center stands the image of the water in the cistern as a mirror pool: whoever looks into it threatens, like Narcissus, to fall into their own reflection. The mechanical trap for the rat and the optical trap for the human become interchangeable; both lure with what is desired. The bait is the echo of one's own body, the smell of the peanut butter as much as the image of one's own self. A second metaphorical layer is organic and digestive. The pipes stuffed with meat, the maggots, the meat with the embedded screen, and the talk of the large intestine transform the installation into a digestive tract, an organism that takes in images, breaks them down, and excretes them again. The image-space appears as a metabolic space in which consumption and dissolution coincide. The obsidian mirror, the glossy version of an arcane room that in the end has absorbed all light into itself, stands for the screen as a threshold behind which seeing no longer knows any outside. The rabbit costume and the kigurumi mask, finally, embody the empty shell: a smooth surface with no subject behind it, through which the gaze passes without ever meeting anyone.

The starting point is the myth of Narcissus, the hunter from Thespiae who perishes at his own mirror image. Cursed translates this primal scene of fatal self-reference into the present of reflecting screens and turns the desire for one's own image into a deadly trap. Psychoanalytically, the work can be connected to Jacques Lacan's mirror stage and his theory of the gaze: the subject constitutes itself not in seeing but in being seen; the gaze lies in the field of the Other, and it is precisely this reversal that the peepholes, cameras, and streams stage. The strict separation of observing and being observed points to Michel Foucault's analysis of panopticism: an architecture of asymmetrical visibility in which the possibility of being seen at any moment shapes behavior. Where the images ultimately refer only to other images and no longer have an origin in reality, Jean Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum is touched upon: the hyperreality in which the image becomes more real than what it depicts. Connected to this are Guy Debord's society of the spectacle and, more contemporary in sociological terms, Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism as well as Jonathan Crary's analyses of attention: the Instagram account as a data-generating loop turns visitors into producers of their own visibility.

In terms of image theory, the endless nesting of hands with smartphones stands in the tradition of the mise en abyme and the Droste effect and can be linked to Hito Steyerl's reflections on the circulation and operationality of the image. The figure of Ashley as an androgynous in-between being between human and machine connects to Donna Haraway's cyborg and to current discourses around digital identity, grief tech, and the continuation of the self beyond death. The organic and morbid elements, dentures, meat, maggots, invoke the art-historical tradition of vanitas and memento mori and tie it back to the biographical question of dementia, loss, and digital preservation. The peephole as the central dispositif, finally, points to Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés, where the gaze is directed through an opening and the viewer is made a voyeur; Cursed radicalizes this arrangement by declaring the voyeur at the same time the one observed.