Kat Mustea
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.
Voidopolis 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. Each July 1, the book resets, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing. The work’s enactment of its own disappearance across all copies of the book worldwide turns the private act of reading into a collective experience of loss. Voidopolis has been recognized as both a work of literature and as a work of new media art, and has been exhibited internationally in a variety of digital and physical formats.
Voidopolis 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. Each July 1, the book resets, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing. The work’s enactment of its own disappearance across all copies of the book worldwide turns the private act of reading into a collective experience of loss. Voidopolis has been recognized as both a work of literature and as a work of new media art, and has been exhibited internationally in a variety of digital and physical formats.
Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist whose experiments with language, live art, and the computational uncanny articulate the absurdities of being human in an increasingly algorithmic world. Her work has been presented at Ars Electronica, New Images Festival, CPH:DOX Lab, New York Live Arts, and The Cube at Virginia Tech, among others. Her TED talk, about AI, agency, and puppetry, offers a novel take on the meaning of generative art-making. Her project BodyMouth, an instrument for embodied speech, was a finalist for the 2024 Lumen Prize as well as the 2024 Guthman Prize, widely regarded as the “Pulitzer for new musical instruments.” Her hybrid work Voidopolis (2023) was released with the MIT Press / Penguin Random House as an augmented reality book, and was named to the Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Storytelling 2024.