meaninglessness

AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS is a web audio adventure about the meaning of death. It draws audio drama, audio tours and alternate reality gaming. The use of audio is an attempt to create a sense of unity in a highly fragmented experience. I see the techniques and experience of audio tours as a way to bring disparate elements together. Just as an audio tour involves guiding a listener to different places, this audio experience guides players to different websites. I include both custom and existing sites, and so this project continues my interest in pervasive design: where the players’ world is part of the fictional world. The story is born out of the pain of suddenly losing my mother, and facing the meaninglessness of my life. I got past heaviness of the subject matter by drawing on my early days in sketch comedy theatre, unifying the disparate times of my life.

(Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

Our deeply ingrained need to trust language enables Feed to generate an endless simulacrum of social commentary cum mythopoeic narrative spontaneously from largely random associations of charged words. It presents cultural observation through the blind eye of chance. The blank passing moment becomes the creator of mythos. It allows us the opportunity to turn ambiguity into poetry, absurdity into satire, unexpected fortuitous alignments into insight. Feed chronicles the mechanisms of the chronicle rather than its subjects. It removes “realism” from the equation, flirting with the meaningless and parading arbitrary associations before the reader under the banners of archetype and metaphor. Feed historicizes, editorializes, moralizes, sings, dances, and wears funny hats, all in the name of “analyzing” its own inventions.

(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI Conference)