2016
3D gameworld, app, and responsive website (to be shown both on a desktop computer and a tablet). The VR release of Pluto will occur in late 2016.
http://allthedelicateduplicat.es
Artist’s Statement:
Pluto is a transmedia work which has at its heart a 3D gameworld. This gameworld delicately blurs fantasy and what’s commonly known as “the real”. Pluto is about what happens when the world as we know it isn’t, doesn’t, shouldn’t: it plays on the fact that perception is a crucial aspect of how we construct (what we know as) reality. When entering the Pluto gameworld, expect the unexpected. Nothing established holds true: or… does it? Time *might * just stretch into and beyond the past and/or run crazily into the future. Realities *may* just switch and merge. And the characters? Let’s just say the characters find and lose, lose and find themselves in this space where realities fragment. But what about the story? Well, the Pluto narrative stitches and stretches through a 3D gameworld, an app, a VR world-extension, and a website hub that houses backstory elements that knit together this duplicating, fracturing place. The plot centers on John, a computer engineer who inherits a collection of weird objects from Mo, his Aunt. Mo bequeaths them to John and his daughter, Charlotte. Over time, John and Charlotte begin to realize that the objects have unusual physical properties and that the more they are exposed to them, the more their realities and memories appear to change. Through the app, a VR/3D gamespace and browser-based story, Pluto presents windows into a splintered storyworld where perceptions are stretched beyond the “real” as we (think we) know it.
Bios:For over two decades, Mez’s award-winning digital writing and games have been influential in shaping interactive genres, net art and digital literature. In August 2015, Mez – along with collaborator Andy Campbell – was awarded the Tumblr International Prize and The Space’s “Open Call” Commission for “Pluto”. Mez was also shortlisted for both the 2015 Thiel Grant Award for Online Writing and in the 2015 “Games Development” Category of the MCV Pacific Women In Games List profiling the: “…most influential women across all facets of the Australian and New Zealand Games Industries.” Since 2011, Mez has partnered with Dreaming Methods to produce Apps, transmedia, and 3D games, with their joint game project “#PRISOM”(produced for The International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2013) making the Finalist List of the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Awards. Mez is Coproducer, Creative Director and Lead Interactive Writer on the upcoming “Inanimate Alice: Perpetual Nomads” Interactive Novel/Virtual Reality Series, an Advisor to The Mixed Augmented Reality Art Research Organisation, a Senior Research Affiliate with The Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab, and is in the process of developing a comprehensive career archive with Duke University’s Curator Collection team.
Andy Campbell has created over 30 works of digital fiction and is a judge of the New Media Writing Prize established by Bournemouth University in partnership with if:book UK. Andy leads One to One Development Trust’s Dreaming Methods, which fuses writing with digital media to create collaborative electronic literature and experimental narrative games.