Voidopolis

Kat Mustatea, Charlotte Kent, Arielle Saiber

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Hardback

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English

MIT Press
26 September 2023

The Arts: General & Reference

Longlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.

Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante's Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita.

Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally ""wiping"" humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter ""e""-in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec's A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter-by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear- its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again. At the end of this decay cycle, only the printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains. Each July 1, the date the project first started on Instagram, the book resets again, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing.

A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from a major university press, Voidopolis is a unique and deeply affecting artwork that speaks as much to our existential moment as it does to the fragility of experience, reality, and our connection to one another.

By: Kat Mustatea, Charlotte Kent
Afterword by: Arielle Saiber
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 178mm, Width: 127mm,
Weight: 567g
ISBN: 9780262048262
ISBN 10: 0262048264
Pages: 136
Publication Date: 26 September 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Series Foreword XI Artist Statement 1 The Book You Are Holding Will Disappear Kat Mustatea How to Activate and Read Voidopolis 21 Voidopolis: On Loss and Liminality, Tragedy and Comedy 121 Charlotte Kent A Present Absence: On Collective Forgetting and the Drive to Remember 131 Arielle Saiber Acknowledgments 143 Need Help? 144

Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist known for language and performance works that enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human. Her TED Talk, about puppets and AI, takes a novel approach to the meaning of machines making art.