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Afterword by Charlotte Kent and Arielle Saiber
Kat Mustatea
Combining digital art, literature, and interpretation, VOIDOPOLIS is a time-sensitive, augmented reality book that quite literally degrades as you read it, so apropos for our time span, and tentative connection with each other.
You can watch Kat give a TED Talk about her unique practice here.
Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize,
Winner of the Arts And Letters ‘Unclassifiable’ Prize For Literature
Winner of the Dante Prize, Dante Society London /Ars Electronica Prize Shortlist
Chautauqua Janus Prize For Literature Finalist
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.
A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from MIT 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. 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.
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.
CREDITS: Voidopolis by Kat Mustatea, 2023 The MIT Press Leonardo Series | Book design and algorithmic decay: Studio Process | Afterwords: Charlotte Kent, Arielle Saiber | App Design: DOTDOT Studio | FUNDING: The MIT Press Fund for Diverse Voices | Open Austria Art and Tech Lab | The US Embassy in Vienna | Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literary Grant | An Art Company
AWARDS: Lumen Prize Shortlist 2023 | Winner of the Arts And Letters ‘Unclassifiable’ Prize For Literature | Winner of the Dante Prize, Dante Society London | Ars Electronica Prize Shortlist 2021 | Chautauqua Janus Prize For Literature Finalist 2021
SELECTED EXHIBITS: Ars Electronica, Linz (AT) | International Center of Photography Bookstore, New York (USA) | Stanley Picker Gallery, London (UK) | New Images Festival Official Selection, Paris (FR) | Pittlerwerke, Leipzig (DE) | Electronic Literature Organization, Bergen (NO) | The Grid: Exposure Festival, San Francisco (USA) | New Media Artspace, New York (USA) | Annka Kultys Gallery, London (UK)
