allegory

An explosion sends you, the reader, from your boat in the Mediterranean into what Homer called the salt immortal sea only to be rescued by a mysterious ancient watercraft. Aboard this boat, you encounter allegorical characters from ancient and modern times, locked in a dangerous power struggle, passing secrets, currying favor, creating enemies, and fostering unrest. In this interactive story, we recast figures in the contemporary refugee crisis against the mythos of the quintessential traveler, Odysseus, for the refugee likewise travels cursed, unable to return home. The story of the refugee is a harrowing reality reimagined here in terms of sirens and cyclops, not to make the horrors of war fanciful but to render the tale of the most abject and disenfranchised of global citizens in epic terms. In Salt Immortal Sea, we explore the international crisis of the refugee by placing the reader on a boat leaving Syria, set adrift on an indifferent, turbulent sea. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to survive. What does it take to survive this existential journey with humanity in tact? How can one negotiate the turbulent waters and the whims of unseen gods and foreign powers in the human tragedy of a proxy war? Salt Immortal Sea will be presented as a stand-alone iPad app (which can be projected or viewed on the device itself). An earlier version of Salt Immortal Sea was displayed in installation form at ELO 2017 in Porto.

Wandering Meimei / Meimei Liu Lang Ji is a bilingual interactive fiction app designed for mobile interfaces for the Chinese market. This story is an intertext to the traditional Chinese comic strip, Sanmao Liu Lang Ji (Wandering Sanmao), a homeless boy. Meimei, meaning little sister, is an allegorical character and contemporary representation of the largest migrant population the world has ever seen: the migrant female factory worker. Through the app, you can make contact with the character Meimei who works in a smartphone factory in the Pearl River Delta city Guangzhou. Meimei's only technology and access point to the outside world is through her own phone. The social media hub and interface enable you to enter and become a part of Meimei's story.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)