Kat Mustatea, Ambivaland (2023)

Kat Mustatea’s follow-up to Voidopolis, which was released as an augmented reality book by MIT Press.  Ambivaland traces the narrative of Dante’s Purgatorio, with new constraints and algorithms.  See her postings on Instagram.

“Ambivaland is a loose retelling of Dante’s Purgatory that traces the interminable pace of trying to emerge from pandemic in NYC. Instead of Virgil, my guide is a caustic hobo named Nikita. The text makes use of synthetic language, generated in this instance without the letters ‘o’ and ‘u’ with the help of an augmented GPT-2 text generator. The images are created by algorithmically wiping humans from stock photography.

“The project is the second in a trilogy that includes Voidopolis, which was enacted on Instagram from July 2020 to February 2021, then subsequently wiped away once the narrative was complete. Ambivaland is likewise meant to culminate in loss and will be wiped away once the story is finished. By ultimately disappearing, these works make a case for the collective amnesia that necessarily follows great cataclysm.”   –Kat Mustatea, mustatea.com (retrieved on August 16, 2024)