Voidopolis
Project Website: voidopolisbook.com
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 was ultimately 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 disappearing, the story makes a case for the collective amnesia that follows great cataclysm.
ORDER NOW: Voidopolis was released in 2023 by MIT Press Leonardo Series / Penguin Random House as an augmented reality book. The project has previously won the Arts and Letters ‘Unclassifiable’ Prize for literature and the Dante 700th Prize for art, has been shown internationally in a variety of digital and physical formats, and premiered as an AR book at Ars Electronica 2021.
Concept, text, and images: Kat Mustatea
Algorithmic decay and book design: Process Studio
AR activations: DOTDOT Studio
Forewords: Charlotte Kent, Arielle Saiber
Funding: Open Austria Art + Tech Lab, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, MIT Press Fund For Diverse Voices, An Art Company. The U.S. Embassy in Vienna provided funds to show the work at Ars Electronica Festival and An Art Company provided AR activations at Ars Electronica.
Awards
Lumen Prize, Shortlist 2023
Dante 700th Prize, Dante Society London 2021
Arts & Letters ‘Unclassifiable’ Prize For Literature 2020
Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Grant 2020
Chautauqua Janus Prize Finalist 2021
Prix Ars Electronica shortlist 2021
Exhibits & Publications
Book: Voidopolis, 2023 (MIT Press, Leonardo Series / Penguin Random House)
Dimensions: Digital Art Since 1859 (Cur: Richard Castelli), Pittlerwerke Leipzig, GER
Stanley Picker Gallery, Digital Sustainability: From Resilience to Transformation, Kingston School of Art, London, UK
Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria—premiere as an AR book
Dante 700th London, Dante Society London, UK 2021
New Images Festival Paris, Official Selection, 2021—world premiere AR installation
The Grid: Exposure x Ars Electronica 2020 / In Kepler’s Gardens, exhibited as an Instagram takeover 2020
Posthuman, ELO2021- Electronic Literature Organization, Bergen, Norway 2021
Excerpts published in Spring 2021 print issue of Arts and Letters Magazine
Brooklyn Book Fair 2021
re:semblance, New Media Artspace NYC 2021
Workshop on Obfuscation 2021, Cornell University / TU Delft 2021
IMMEMORY: On COVID-19, virtual / ongoing
Press & Interviews
The Theatre Times: The Art and Tech Imaginings of Kat Mustatea, interview by Alexander Fatouros
London ONE Radio (in Italian/English)
Leonardo/ISAST podcast: Dante’s Inferno in augmented reality, interview with Vanessa Chang
Dovetail Magazine feature by Kate Mothes
CLOT Magazine feature by Ana Prendes
Virtual Art To Experience Right Now in Dovetail Magazine
Ampersand Interview Series: interview by Kelsie Doran
Spotlight at Dante Today
The AI Corner: Haunting Times by Beth Jochim
Talks
Leonardo LASER Talks, Stanford University 2021
Panel: Experimental Stories, MIX2021: Amplified Publishing 2021
Voidopolis featured in a keynote on Dante by Prof. Arielle Saiber at American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS) Conference 2021
Panel: AI x LITERATURE: Poetry Is A Machine, The Grid: Exposure and Ars Electronica 2020
Panel: What’s Next? Art-Science Ideas Emerging From The Lockdon, Leonardo/ISAST and S+T+ARTS, as part of Ars Electronica / In Kepler’s Gardens 20210
Critical Notes
Dante made the extraordinary move of writing in the vernacular of his time. Mustatea confirms that social media is undoubtedly ours.
—Charlotte Kent, art/new media writer
[VOIDOPOLIS] takes to heart and exploits the reality that a writer today is not simply a "writer" who writes, creating a text, but a media artist not using a 19th century typewriter but an extremely powerful typesetting machine now connected to the internet. I also was attracted to the ephemeral nature of the piece, its temporary-ness. A piece about the virus infects itself with its own digital virus that rewrites then erases the living codes.
—Michael Martone, judge for the Arts & Letters ‘Unclassifiable’ Prize for Literature
Having spent decades tracking where and how Dante shows up in contemporary culture…I am rarely stopped in my tracks by Dante-inspired work… [I]t is unusual to find myself in front of a piece that yanks me out of my professorial tendency to think nihil sub sole novum. In front of Voidopolis, the yank happened so quickly all I could see was novum.
—Arielle Saiber, Dante scholar
