Searching Kiki, Lost Lovers Across Platforms
Medium: Experimental Animation using Google maps, Unity, and Vuplex VR web-browser
Sound Collaboration with Reece Anderson
2020
Searching Kiki is a multi-media engaged narrative using Google maps, Unity 3D, and Vuplex VR live web-browser, following the story of two lovers who become separated between network platforms, their political geographies, and governing jurisdictions. As political subjects to a platform-state, how are user-citizens governed? If the network is the State, then which activities will be encouraged or discouraged through legislative means? Following the protagonist's desperate search for her lost lover, viewers experience the physical and virtual spaces negotiated within network architecture. Computation is experienced not as a purely virtual activity- but as physical events embedded in user geographies. The project questions what bodies experience as the platform connects and separates people, includes and excludes geographic domains, acquires and dissolves other platform-states in the infinite shifting of network tectonics.
The star-crossed lovers tale is reinterpreted within the context of globalized computation, taking place in a world where web platforms rule as sovereign states, users are citizens to a network domain, and web spaces are physical events meshed in real geographies. The project maps network architecture as a political geography and questions how governance is implemented over users within informational structures.
References
Bratton, Benjamin. “The Nomos of the Cloud.” The Stack. The MIT Press, 2016. Web.
Bratton, Benjamin. “Platform and Stack, Model and Machine.” The Stack. The MIT Press, 2016. Web.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Panoptic Mondernity.” An Introduction to Visual Culture. Routledge. 1999, pp 94- 107.