Voidopolis

A digital performance about loss and memory

Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an AR book with a limited lifespan. The story is a loose retelling of Dante’s Inferno, informed by the grim experience of wandering through NYC during a pandemic. Instead of Virgil, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita.

Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. Its images are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and the text is generated without the letter ‘e’ using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that will eventually be deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: the book’s pages are garbled and can only be deciphered with an AR app, which, after enough readings, decays the images and words just as memory would. The printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains as a leftover artifact. By ultimately disappearing, the work makes a case for the collective amnesia that follows great cataclysm.

The project is the result of a collaboration between Kat Mustatea (concept, text, images) and Process (algorithmic decay, book design). AR activations by An Art Company.

Released through MIT Press/Penguin Random House

The book was released worldwide in August 2023.

On view at ARS ELECTRONICA 2021

Voidopolis — A digital performance about loss and memory.
On view at ARS ELECTRONICA 2021: A New Digital Deal.
8–12 September 2021, Linz, Austria