Underbelly is a playable media fiction about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former colliery in the north of England, now landscaped into a country park. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of repressed fears and desires about the artist’s sexuality, potential maternity and worldly ambitions, mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal.
Created in Flash for the web, Underbelly incorporates a rich and often grotesque mix of imagery, spoken word, video, animation, text, interactivity and random programming within a traversable map-like narrative terrain. Its design is based on the remarkable uterine qualities of the Hereford Mappa Mundi combined with diagrams of female reproductive organs and 19th Century illustrations of mines and pit workers. Video, shot in point-of-view close-ups, represents the woman’s above-ground activity and conscious concerns, but it’s persistently undermined by visual, vocal and kinetic elements generated by the ‘subconscious realm’.
Winner of the New Media Writing Prize 2010
Winner of the MaMSIE Digital Media Competiton 2010/11
