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Short abstract:

This project will be presented as a 15 minute video work followed by a 15 min. presentation about the research methods used to develop the artistic work.

Abstract:

House of Mu is a project that both imagines and constructs an alternative media infrastructure and digital economy for creative-critical work. Presented as a video essay and animated prototypes, House of Mu blends popular entertainment, STS, and media theory to the contemporary technoscientific moment. House of Mu draws from “third space” worldmaking as a framework for practitioners of art and research to create and sustain virtual worlds (narratives, networks, spaces, beliefs) and transcultural maker communities using XR/ML tools. Inspired by Third Cinema, spacemaking involves a practice of symbolic dramaturgy in which shared community artifacts (language, gestures, figures) are in exchange toward new forms of virtuality, political formations, and social transformation. House of Mu is told through the story of Somu Hwa, an avatar based on a traditional mask dance play, and extends its diegetic space with Kenya-based art collectives, Ghanaian hackers, and Senegalese science fiction writers exploring narratives of electronic waste, arts activism, and indigenous mysticism. The foundational lore of House of Mu explores the Faustian negotiations at play in acquiring virtual personhood through the metaphor of “the white mask,” as Somu Hwa dances into the metaverse and its logic of perpetual speculation, in the midst of the very real possibilities of adopting multiple personas and heightened forms of social presence in the collective global village-theater that is digital life. Drawing from avant-garde performance artists as much as scholars of global media infrastructures, House of Mu is a creative work making serious provocations about where to take research next.