Voidopolis and the Art of Disappearing
From the Oulipian novel A Void by Georges Perec, which was written entirely without the letter e, to the infamous shredded painting by Banksy, the tactics of ephemerality, contingency, and disappearance have been potent conduits for meaning and subversion in a range of contemporary art-making. Voidopolis, a first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from MIT Press Leonardo Series, can only be deciphered via an accompanying AR app, and decays over time the way memory might, leaving behind foggy imagery and half-remembered bits of language. It is a jumping off point for examining the emergent aesthetics of decay, destruction, and disappearance at the forefront of artmaking in the digital age.
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Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist whose work combines 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 Ars Electronica Linz, New Images Festival Paris, Stanley Picker Gallery London, New York Live Arts, 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 recently short-listed for the Lumen Prize.
