For its 25th anniversary, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) held an international in-person conference and media arts festival themed “Love Letters to the Past and Future.”
ELO25 @ 25 was a joint hosting between the University of Waterloo and York University, and I had a blast helping our fearless leaders Caitlin Fisher and Lai-Tze Fan coordinate it.
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| ELO@25 |
I also led a workshop on the first day at the University of Waterloo titled "The Undergrid: DIY VFX for Citizen Science Fiction," the first public event for my new project!
Huge thanks to Sean Sollé and Rhys Mendes for thinking through the tinkering with me, even if at the last moment I decided to go with off-the-shelf components from Ikea on this initial outing, to keep the number of variables in check.
Imagine gaining the power to harness sunlight with your bare hands. Picture turning your palm upward to collect solar energy, then channeling it through your body to make your other hand glow with the light of that power. The Undergrid is a mixed-reality, participatory storytelling project that turns solar power into a literal superpower, with carbon-fuelled misinformation as its kryptonite.
In this solarpunk storyworld, those who choose to undergo a new form of photovoltaic inoculation gain the ability not only to absorb energy from the sun, but also to send it to other members of a global network known as The Undergrid, through the simple gesture of touching the earth. Like a human version of a virtual power plant, they can also store energy in the planet's core for others to use – up to seven generations into the future.
This would seem to be a wholly positive new dawn in the history of humankind. Who wouldn’t choose superpowers if they had the chance? But where there's light, shadows will gather. Conspiracy theories spread by the anonymous Circuitburners are designed to engineer fear and anger against the movement, and slow the uptake of non-polluting power.
This new storyworld is a form of “citizen science fiction,” designed to hotwire critical thinking with practical making in an active inoculation against the storytelling techniques of misinformation. Workshop participants will be among the first to experiment with a creative kit including dramaturgical prompts, an adapted dataset of real-world climate misinformation, and hands-on tinkering components (small solar panels, LEDs, and rechargeable batteries) for do-it-yourself visual effects, or DIY VFX, as they use their own phones to record their adventures in The Undergrid.
The next morning, I gave an artist talk titled "Citizen Science Fiction: Mixed-Reality Participatory Storytelling vs. Tragedies of the Commons," part of a panel on Community and Participation:
How can approaches drawn from the dramatic arts and digital humanities be recombined for education in the 21st century, especially for training in what political scientist Danielle Allen calls the three core tasks of civic agency: “disinterested deliberation, prophetic frame shifting, and fair fighting”? How can interactive digital media complement ancient human traditions like Indigenous glyph-based knowledge practices and the rhetorical techniques of classical theatre? How can a new form of mixed-reality participatory storytelling called “citizen science fiction” intervene in tragedies of the commons like vaccine hesitancy and climate inaction?
Shadowpox: The Cytokine Storm (2016-2024) is a generative networked narrative reimagining the science and sociology of vaccination through a superhero metaphor. Co-created with young artists at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London), Debajehmujig Storytellers (Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory), the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation Youth Centre (Cape Town), and York University (Toronto), the storyworld empowers participants to explore what makes a story compelling, what makes science convincing, and how misinformation works to bust trust and engineer fear. While the start of this sci-fi pandemic predated Covid by several years, in early 2021, Shadowpox became the spine of a pedagogy/drama hybrid called a “courseplay”, where media arts undergraduates in lockdown blended reading, writing and role-playing to study the social dynamics around a historic rollout of new vaccines.
The research-creation insights of Shadowpox inform a new citizen science fiction project, The Undergrid (2025-), framing the battle between the energy transition and climate misinformation in a solarpunk scenario. This massively multi-writer storyworld will once again blend DIY VFX and networked narrative to counter the merchants of doubt, delay, deflection and denial. The Undergrid is currently in development with Debajehmujig Storytellers, working with the rising generation to blaze trails from paralyzing climate anxiety toward green skill-building, optimism and action.
There were so many high points of the conference, but one of my favourites was getting to see exhibited artworks like The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain by Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher and Scott Rettberg...
...Seeing Through the Dark at East Beijing Road by Haoran Chang...
...and Particulate Matter / Midge Swarm by Christina Dovolis, Jorge De Oliveira, Luka Kuplowsky, Dolleen Manning & Mary Bunch, which featured an otter stuffie as an electronic controller!
