In ERROR 507: EGO EXCEEDED, designer Alina Zykina transforms four screens in New York’s Times Square into a single oversized claw machine.
A digital piece for Art Innovation’s 2025 Urban Pixels exhibition, the work employs the architecture of a space not as a background, but as part of its composition, transforming the separate screens into its walls and giving the impression that objects exist in a shared space beyond their screens.
The machine holds a catalogue of bizarre objects. Some are inspired by Zykina’s stuff; others represent her memories, anxieties, loved ones, fever dreams and private gags. A Wacom pencil indicates aspects of her life, and a watch relates to the experience of emigrating. A bunch of intentionally absurd objects includes a “situationship membership card”. The balloon at the heart of the collection is called EGO. The claw moves through the objects before choosing EGO, and the balloon begins to inflate until it pops, ending the game with a GAME OVER.
What looks like a joke conceals a significant issue.
She conceived the work when work had become a stable aspect of her professional identity. Yet even after spending over nine years establishing a career and switching locations, work was increasingly loaded with meanings beyond rent and essentials; it was becoming central to one’s autonomy and feeling of safety. The claw machine is an allegory for that condition: the prizes are on display, the option looks accessible, but control is never absolute.
EGO is intentionally in flux. It can imply narcissism, career, fame, but also the desire to believe that what one has accumulated amounts to something. The balloon’s ultimate destruction does not equate to snubbing the desire for ambition; the work instead asks what can occur when a career is asked to support too many stabilisers simultaneously—money, selfhood, approval, free will, future. The choice of EGO reflects the pressure to build a stable professional identity, alongside the fear that the time and energy invested in that effort may not lead to the stability hoped for, or may come at the expense of other parts of life. GAME OVER captures that fear and uncertainty rather than declaring the choice right or wrong.
All of this is underscored by the language Zykina employs in her work. Her terminology as a commercial motion designer (using glossy surfaces, rich colour, caricatured shapes and comic timing) has been seen to dominate ERROR 507. This is artifice, though, with the artifice of autobiography underneath: an arcade game or giant toy machine and, beneath this, maximum professional unease, displacement, insecurity and fear.
What makes the piece particularly effective is the contrast between this playful, immediately legible visual language and the anxiety underneath it. The oversized claw machine is visually striking enough to function as spectacle in Times Square, but the transformation of EGO into the object the machine ultimately chooses gives the work an emotional tension that goes beyond the joke. The distinction between the polished commercial aesthetic and the personal unease underneath it is, for me, one of the work’s most distinctive qualities.
The technical making of the work cannot be divorced from its meaning. The set of four screens has a total horizontal resolution of greater than 8K, incorporating a vertically elongated middle screen. She uses her animations to make the boundaries between the screens vanish, combining them so that the four separate LED surfaces clearly read as a single object. The sense of an anamorphic ‘naked-eye’ illusion comes from the virtual space being physically calibrated to the displays’ shape, so that it seems to reach beyond the borders of the screens and into the air.
The process of reconstruction was in itself as much, if not more, a part of the installation.
Alina Zykina did not have the physical dimensions of the installation, nor the opportunity to test the installation in the environment before the show. She used the digital layout and resolution files, rebuilding the relationship between the screens and the architecture in three dimensions and, because of this, hopefully creating the illusion.
Like that, the title ERROR 507: EGO EXCEEDED plays on this same logic. This time, it uses technical language to describe something human and intangible. A human problem turns into a system error: the ego has overreached the machine.
Finally, the project did not end with the exhibition. The designer eventually shared her experience by creating a tutorial, NAKED EYE IN 2 MINUTES, describing how she achieved that illusion; eventually, that led to 55,260 hits on LinkedIn. The journey is typical of a project: a personal experience becomes an artwork, a technical piece, and finally, a resource for other practitioners.
ERROR 507: EGO EXCEEDED is more worried about what transpires when a self-fashioned professional identity starts to bear responsibility for keeping an entire existence afloat than about the distant glitz of Times Square.