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Spellcaster

  • Some notes on the prototype:

Artist Statement

The web is vast, complex, and mysterious. What lies in its hidden depths?

This project aims to investigate what "reality" means online, and how users can bend it. We often tend to give magical or mystical explanations to things we do not understand. Think of eclipses in the middle ages or grandparents not understanding how to use skype ("is my computer alive?"). What kind of explanations do we start inventing when we don't understand technology?

The digital spellcaster replaces candles and sage with data. Offline, the "real" is what can be touch or felt. Online, what is "real" is hard to define. Users are invited to use whatever materials they can find to cast spells, and bring this data back to them. I am interested in how users will react to an interpretation of the web that is more personal and mystical. Will they be fearful? Empowered? In any case, I hope it brings them to reflect on the nature of what they encounter online and their power over it.

Progression

This project initially started as a poetical exploration of digital writing. I found that my initial concept lacked depth, and decided to wrap the idea of poetry and text into the spellcaster. The concept started emerging as I was coding it, adding conceptual elements to what was originally a poetry bot to make up for weeknesses in the system. I also had to give up the voice function which turned out to be difficult to manage on p5. I of course grossly overscoped and took a million years longer then expected. But anyways, here is prototype 2.1!

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