Projects: Ithaca

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Ithaca: Possible Worlds – 2017 (with Damon Loren Baker)exhibited at HASTAC Orlando recoded, redesigned, rewritten and remounted as an immersive VR piece “Always tomorrow’ for ELO 2019 in Cork, Ireland

“Possible Worlds: Ithaka” was a magic mirror augmented reality installation that positioned the viewer in the centreof a visual galaxy of40 small interactive spheres, suggestive of planets but textured with distorted images that resonate with the stories they hold within. This workused an innovative eye-tracking technology (advanced by Baker) as part of the work’s interface. The viewer interacts withthe spheres in any order to activate audio and unfold a time-twisting, gap-denying love story set in Berlin in the Weimar Republic with a tomorrow already speaking itself on the protagonists’ lips. We hope the piece resonates with the contemporary moment, too, closing the gap between histories and futures; the objects of our desires and our longing. It’s also a mediation on the power of poetry.

She draws poems out of him he didn’t know were possible. They are not anything he knew before he saw her. He writes in his notebooks and when they fill he writes on napkins, the words pouring and dirty and in an English that does not yet exist. This week’s variation: His poems are increasingly of stars; constellations: desire, bright lights, the curve of Isabelle’s shoulder. In his poem his tongue traces along the estuaries of her body and makes her scream. She is the Andromeda galaxy; she is a whore he takes without words outside against a rough wall; she is once again the singer he is utterly in love with, kneeling in front of him, greedily taking him into a hot mouth; she is the end of all fucking poetry. In reality, he heads home to his pret ty shabby room and dreams of her, his hand on his cock, helpless in the face of fantasy Isabelle: she is a machine. She is safety. She is the future. She is the next world war.
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