Kat Mustatea: Voidopolis & the Art of Disappearing

Sat, Mar 16 2024
10:30 pm – 11:00 pm
Central Library

Night in the Library


Room: Art & Music, 3rd Floor

Voidopolis (2023, The MIT Press / Leonardo Series) is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality (AR) book made to disappear, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City. Every detail of the story is crafted to evoke loss: the stock photographs of New York City with humans wiped away, the lipogrammatic AI-generative text missing the letter e. The book’s pages are garbled and can only be deciphered through an AR app published alongside the book—but over a period of a year, its digital components decay the way memory might, leaving behind foggy imagery and half-remembered bits of language. https://www.voidopolisbook.com/

Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist working at the forefront of live performance and cutting-edge technology. Her experiments with language and new narrative forms enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human in the digital age. Her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, Ars Electronica Linz, New Images Festival Paris, Stanley Picker Gallery London, The Cube at Virginia Tech, among others. Her TED talk about AI as a form of puppetry offers a novel take to the meaning of generative art-making. Her hybrid digital artistic and literary work, Voidopolis (2023, MIT Press Leonardo), a first-of-its kind augmented reality book made to disappear, won the Arts and Letters 'Unclassifiable' Prize for Literature and was short-listed for the Lumen Prize.

10 Grand Army Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11238 Get Directions
Add to My Calendar 03/16/2024 10:30 pm 03/16/2024 11:00 pm America/New_York Kat Mustatea: Voidopolis & the Art of Disappearing

Room: Art & Music, 3rd Floor

Voidopolis (2023, The MIT Press / Leonardo Series) is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality (AR) book made to disappear, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City. Every detail of the story is crafted to evoke loss: the stock photographs of New York City with humans wiped away, the lipogrammatic AI-generative text missing the letter e. The book’s pages are garbled and can only be deciphered through an AR app published alongside the book—but over a period of a year, its digital components decay the way memory might, leaving behind foggy imagery and half-remembered bits of language. https://www.voidopolisbook.com/

Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist working at the forefront of live performance and cutting-edge technology. Her experiments with language and new narrative forms enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human in the digital age. Her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, Ars Electronica Linz, New Images Festival Paris, Stanley Picker Gallery London, The Cube at Virginia Tech, among others. Her TED talk about AI as a form of puppetry offers a novel take to the meaning of generative art-making. Her hybrid digital artistic and literary work, Voidopolis (2023, MIT Press Leonardo), a first-of-its kind augmented reality book made to disappear, won the Arts and Letters 'Unclassifiable' Prize for Literature and was short-listed for the Lumen Prize.

Brooklyn Public Library - Central Library MM/DD/YYYY 60