Proposal 2020 Arcade Campfa Digital commission

“Laurie Holden’s Mansions of Mist”

Uma Breakdown

Twine is a coding language for quickly writing simple, primarily text based video games and interactive stories, which can be hosted online and played directly through a web browser on almost any computer. “Laurie Holden’s Mansions of Mist” is an artwork I would like to make in Twine, which uses the opportunities provided by the coding language (i.e. forking narrative paths, text which changes depending on previous decisions or at random, simple embedded images) to combine the Gothic Mansion (i.e. rooms for everything, hidden rooms, rooms which change, strange codes and rituals) with feminist writing strategies of Hélène Cixous and Kathy Acker (i.e. language that appropriates, mutates, collapses, destabilises character and voice).

The artwork takes as its source material Frank Darabont’s 2007 film “The Mist”, which concerns residents of a small town trapped in a supermarket surrounded by a thick mist full of monsters. The artwork also draws from the relationship between “The Mist” and other works by Darabont, via its cast of character-actors, who often play characters which are recycled (unacknowledged) from this film. Laurie Holden in particular is a genre star who is repeatedly cast in very similar doomed but heroic roles that begin to merge into one character across her body of work.

Following Cixous and Acker, the artwork explores how the structures and feeling of language can be destabilized through the telling of a story which itself deals with a domestic space that is unstable and strange.