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.
For Exposure, new episodes of VOIDOPOLIS are being exhibited on CODAME's instagram over the entire week, from 7 September through 13 September.
