RESIDENCY PROPOSAL

by Ambika Subramaniam

The story revolves around Maria and Luisa, two video game characters who were beat out by the Mario Bros in 1985, shoved into oblivion with the likes of Attari E.T. The mysterious Generator grants them an upgrade into the contemporary and releases them into the world of Super Maria 3D World. The sisters explore the architectural facets of the Generator’s levels, encountering various external digital bodies while assimilating into their own three-dimensional selves. The narrative is written by myself in the form of a book, and derives from long, tangent-filled conversations with a fellow artist.

The story is concerned with the post-human body, its interactions with other bodies, and its schizophrenic tendency to take lines of flight and manifest in multiple forms – female, digital, linguistic, through text. My residency with Unstitute will expand on this narrative, exploring physical and digital text: where forms of discussion, conversation, and script create separate bodies of information/social narratives. The unfiltered process of textual navigation, it’s recording, and it’s continuous engagement, will all be researched and eventually outputted in the creation of an interactive dialogue platform with the Unstitute. The platform will be a three-way text conversation with Maria, Luisa, and a third-party user that constantly evolves based on inputted information. In preparation for the interactive site, I will be posting biweekly audio recordings related to the conversations of Maria and Luisa. The narrative will carry throughout the residency and serve as a lens through which these topics can be explored.
June, 2015