Unless the Outcome is Income, 2025

Video/Game Installation

5 Gold Heart Pillows, Custom Full Mattress Sheet and Mattress, Projected 3-D Animated Video, Video Game Installed on 2 32” Touchscreen White Tablets

This exhibition, Unless the Outcome is Income, was up at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego, November 9th-December 6th, and was the first institutional solo exhibition by Dahlia Bloomstone, presented as part of the University’s artist-in-residence program. The show thinks through morality as material. 

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The video game, titled Unless the Outcome is Income: Roblox, is a Roblox game that engages with the history and politics surrounding the popular children’s gaming platform. The game considers and engages with Roblox’s new content guidelines, in which a game is rated 17+ if it contains romantic themes, including non-sexual expressions of love or affection, or if it is considered a sensitive issue, defined as “a current sensitive social, political, or religious issue that is both polarizing and emotionally charged.”
 

Roblox has an enduring “sex problem,” as strip club games and predators continue to appear despite “heavy moderation,” revealing broader cultural politics. In the game, the avatar is tasked with a series of moral choices that amount to arbitrary scores. Based on her choices, she is transported to different rooms, where she either engages in romantic connections or is paid for them. In both rooms, the avatar is moralized. Neither the rooms nor these exchanges are particularly important to the game. What matters is what she does at the end, when she is asked to donate, and how much. 
 

“NSPM-7 says any of the following can be indicators of violence: anti-capitalism, extremism on gender, hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, [and] hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on morality.” All of my games have been newly rated 17+ for romantic themes and sensitive issues. Without this tag, they would have been removed from the platform on September 30, 2025.

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The game is framed around ideas and language related to work, survival, and capital—idiomatic phrases like “taking your work home with you” or “becoming your work”—and uses visual signifiers such as damask patterns or a domestic gamer chair.

 

In-game, visitors can donate either on my behalf (both games are hosted on my Roblox accounts in the gallery) or through their own accounts on their own devices using Robux (Roblox’s in-world currency) by interacting with dancing avatar NPCs at the end of the game. Fundraising and donations are against the platform’s policies. The platform itself has nonetheless become a site of protest, as young players have organized digital demonstrations for Palestine and against ICE.    
 

So far, approximately 20,000 Robux has been donated both through my account and via other players’ accounts, which converts to about $200. These funds will go to Palestinian aid and ICE detainee support as long as the game remains on the platform (as long as Roblox doesn’t find out) and players continue to engage. Players can donate 5, 20, 100, or 1,000 Robux at a time.

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There is a final room that can be accessed, past the donation station, by attempting to enter through the back: a room filled with red and white sparkling light from floor to ceiling. The avatar sits among the lights. 
 

The animated video, titled Unless the Outcome is Income: Animation (11:36), begins in a money-driven fishtank simulator with damasked walls and a lap dance couch. The dancer floats above her client and drifts off into a fable about a mother who was not supportive of her daughter, both while she was growing up and later when she became an erotic dancer in adulthood. The mother was also unsupportive of her best friend, a woman who also worked as an erotic dancer throughout her adult life into her fifties, saved no money, and never found love. The mother has no empathy for either her daughter or her best friend, “O.” She only finds empathy much later, when she marries a man, a “golf pro,” who had been a bachelorette-party stripper in his youth. The fable ends with the line, “Now the mom congratulates the daughter on how much money she has saved.” 
 

The animation transitions into the next act with swimming snails and the mother singing tenderly to her daughter a Puerto Rican nursery rhyme, “Pollito, Chicken.”

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The daughter, the same big-eyed limbless fish character, is now with a romantic connection, not a paid one. She is not being treated well, and her date tells her to “just treat him like a client” while they are at a sushi dinner. The daughter reflects on her time with a client who was kind to her. She thinks, “Memories are work.”
 

As she is swallowed by water during another paid date at a stadium with a very cute shark, the scene transitions to her bedroom. She floats from her bed to her computer, where a Hasan Piker livestream is playing. He is reacting to a video in which conservative commentator Tomi Lahren discusses Bad Bunny appearing at the Super Bowl, expressing confusion that he is “Puerto Rican and not American.”

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Next, the character researches for her upcoming show. She moves between tabs: the history of sterilization in Puerto Rico; searches for strip clubs near her residency location; news about Mamdani and Cuomo’s stances on prostitution; an email offering her $8,000 from a client; another email reminding her to pick up vinyl for a show; a LOLCOW Live sloptube livestream featuring conservative commentators proclaiming, “WHORES DID NOT BUILD THE GAMING COMMUNITY, WE DID!” She then rates all of the Roblox games she has made under the platform’s new content restriction guidelines, watches a Hooters TikTok claiming they are returning to their “family friendly roots,” reads a news page that states “TAXI TV IS MAGA NOW,” and finally opens a Google Doc in which she tries to place art and labor, though no substantial thoughts appear beyond those words.

 

She returns to bed and sinks into it.