dystopia

This poetic experience uses Twine and operates like a hypertext choose-your-own-adventure. The player must navigate a map to unlock clues about the nature of the landscape - a process called "medicating." Throughout this hellish roadtrip, the player's navigation depends on choices in cardinal directions, character interactions and even dictionary definitions. This work was created as one half of my graduate thesis. Collectively, the work on the page and the hypertext poem is known as Educational Materials for Mostly Mitigated Maidens. I completed this graduate program in 2019, obtaining a Masters in poetry. Since then, I spend my time writing, exploring other digital spaces, and teaching college composition at Solano Community College. Here is the link to Directional Pilgrim. It will launch in your browser and, for the full experience, requires speakers or headphones. Use the mouse to click and point - no other buttons are required. Google Chrome is recommended browser.

Utopia is a state which allows for a certain amount of resolution - a period or space which exists in equilibrium. Dystopia, then, is a state in which nothing can be resolved. A solution is needed, but every effort to balance opposing forces results in a renewal of already overbearing systems in control. To me, it is this repetition of effort that characterizes a dystopia. Landscape comes as an afterthought, and can take many forms. In 2018, fires ravaged the state of California. This was the space that I began my work in. Although the natural world around me expanded in all directions, the feeling was one of claustrophobia. Our yearly cycle revolves around our wildfire season - there is no way to avoid it, and each year it gets worse. This, coupled with my own anxieties surrounding mental health and addition, inspired the dystopian space of Directional Pilgrim. Just as medieval pilgrims circled Jerusalem, hitting holy waystations and reading (and therefore reenacting) the Bible passages relevant to the particular place, so does the player as pilgrim revisit the passages in this apocalyptic landscape. By redoing (and often repeating) these experiences, the player may come to find meaning in the journey itself - even though the resolution to the narrative remains elusive.

Sabotage Retroexistencial is a digital poem generator produced by an algorithmic sequence that pertains to the blog novel series of "Kublai Moon", specifically the blog novel "La tierra nunca comprenderá". This algorithmic poetry generator gives the reader access to an unlimited combination of poems and to an infinite text. In the fictional world of Kublai Moon where the story is set, the generator is the creation of the robot Al-Halim, an artificial intelligence engine who searches for the meaning and limits of poetry. 

Vicente Luis Mora is a literary critic and Spanish author of Alba Cromm, a book that takes place in a sinister dystopian future. It tells the events that lead to the capture of the infamous pederast, highly wanted by the National Police, NEMO, through a dossier. Utilizing the print form, Alba Cromm adopts the review structure through a variety of stylistic resources, such as diary entries, publicity announcements, and interviews. The obvious theme elapsed through most of the work is the fight with the embodied passions in the human institution, such as the protection fo the most vulnerable, like children.

The Institute for Southern Contemporary Art is a long-term project that aims todevelop an experimental platform for artists and cultural producers throughresults derived from machine learning and art market data. Drawing from climatechange disasters and the use of algorithmic analysis, the video portrays adystopian future where the creation of art is tied to its market consumption.Although ISCA’s mission seems disconcerting, it also strikes as strangelyfamiliar. Is ISCA simply looking to join the likes of existing programs such asArtRank and Art Advisor, or does it rather wish to shed light on the possiblepitfalls of these endeavours? Doubt is at the core of this proposition.

(source: Description from the schedule)

Redshift & Portalmetal asks: as climate change forces us to travel to the stars and build new homes and families, how do we build on this land, where we are settlers, while working to undo colonization? The story uses space travel as a lens through which to understand the experience of migration and settlement for a trans woman of color. Redshift & Portalmetal tells the story of Roja, who's planet's environment is failing, so she has to travel to other worlds. The project takes the form of an online, interactive game, including film, performance and poetry.

Evolution is a online artwork that emulates the writing and compositions of poet and artist Johannes Heldén. The application analyzes a set of all published text- and sound-work by the artist and generates a continuously evolving poem that simulates Heldéns style : in vocabulary, the spacing in-between words, syntax. In this performance, the digital version of artist meets the original. The aim is to raise questions about authenticity, about the future, about physics and science fiction.

(Source: http://chercherletexte.org/en/performance/evo-lution/)

Taking the concept of identity theft to its logical conclusion, DNA is an interactive, Web-based novel set in the year 2075, in a future where genetic clones are commonplace and the unique identity of any individual is protected only by tacit consent. Detailing a year in the life of a clone who begins plotting to take on the identity of one of his "code partners," the novel includes a series of hyperlinks to real and fictional Wikipedia entries that provide a peek into the dystopic future of economic, agricultural, cultural, social, and political systems. Influenced by a range of electronic and experimental literary works published over the last fifteen years, DNA presents a non-linear narrative that allows each reader to select his or her own narrative path though the novel and to explore the text's connection to other fictional and non-fictional texts published on the Web. The networked architecture of the project enables the reader to not only construct and engage with the narrative world of the novel itself but with other narrative worlds that exist outside of the novel. Overlapping, relating to, and informing one another, the various narrative worlds created inside and outside of the novel draw attention to the dynamic and generative nature of digital narratives, as well as to their ability to challenge traditional notions and definitions of authorial intention, the role of the reader, and narrative point of view. Additional interactive features enabling readers to contribute their own texts and links to the novel are currently being developed. Conceived as a novel that will appeal to readers of literary and dystopic fiction, as well as to a new generation of readers who access texts exclusively via the World Wide Web, DNA is informed by various electronic literature projects, as well as by several important dystopic novels, including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Yevgeny Zemyatin’s We, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Fiction writers have been experimenting with digital hypertext and multimedia projects since the late-1980s, and several important works were published in the 1990s, including afternoon, a story (1990) by Michael Joyce, Victory Garden (1991) by Stuart Moulthrop, Patchwork Girl (1995) by Shelley Jackson, and 253 or tube theater by Geoff Ryman (1996). More recent hypertext and multimedia projects have been collected in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 (2006) and Volume 2 (2011). Combining my interests in creative writing, narrative studies and the history of the novel, the sociology of literacy, and digital Humanities, DNA is both a digital novel and part of an ongoing narrative-studies project that considers what effects digital authoring tools and reading platforms are having on fiction in general, and the novel in particular. Based on my own experience composing a Web-based novel, as well as on the analysis of other digital literary projects published in the last two years, and a review of digital literary projects published over the last fifteen years, I am studying how various elements of the novel as genre are being translated and/or re-conceived given the new possibilities and constraints created by multimedia tools for writing and reading. (Source: Author's Project Overview)

Modern Moral Fairy Tales is a tale told in 18 (chai) nodes. The story has two main lines--an upfront fairy tale dealing with greed, isolation, Nigerian scams, and online learning.  The shadow story for this main line concerns a sentient internet cafe and a state run dissemination of information or suppression of information, depending on how you approach it.  MaJe thought this was waaaaay too dark, and hid an Official History of Salmon in Clear Water Ravines, which posits a much better society--under the waves. Her shadow story handles the day to day life of salmon, from financial news to recent literary acquisitions.