The Optimum Aquarium is a short film that interrogates who controls where people live in 21st-century Bushwick and Ridgewood: two neighborhoods on the border of Brooklyn and Queens that are experiencing the churn and change of gentrification.

The Optimum Aquarium invites its viewers into the inner worlds of fish tanks, their inhabitants, and their owners, and puts fish tank care in dialogue with cultural and historical ideas around containment, ownership, and human/animal life cycles. The film takes us into the mindset of commercial developers seeking to transform the neighborhood, focusing on Myrtle Point/Ridgewood Towers — a development where an immigrant worker fell to his death in 2022. This halted construction site reflects the cold calculations of capital and our limited ability to control the built environments around us.

Interspersed with shots of the neighborhood and fish tanks are screen grabs from The Sims 4: City Living, a game where an ideology of ownership and unattainable utopia emerges. By juxtaposing gameplay with real-life images and sounds of a neighborhood in flux, The Optimum Aquarium examines how mythologies about landlordism persist around us — and wonders how we might create alternate futures.