‘Into the Ethereal’ by Nella Piatek
MA Interaction Design (2020-2021)
London College of Communication, University of Arts London,
Key supervisors: Dr. Wesley Goatley
Into the Ethereal is an interactive fiction placed in a Post-Internet future, where servers of smaller social platforms such as Tumblr are shut down as a result of an oligopoly of larger platforms. Consequently, causing archives of certain marginalised online communities to be wiped out.
Into the Ethereal builds on the promises and limitations of digital technologies, and explores the lost futures of those left behind in abandoned or obliterated internet structures. It explores how memory can survive in the fragments of digital ruins, and how these forms of externalisation become products of our own identity. By using witchcraft as a methodology, this interactive piece intends to explore radical futures and the new experiences that could emerge if human attitudes and views towards digital technologies become more spiritual, sensuous and emotional. Here, the contemporary witch is a figure that gives legitimacy to enact new unconventional practice, whilst sharing and up-keeping situated knowledges that are marginalised by society. This narratively skilled voice allows the audience to step into an experience where previous ontological and epistemological constructs are disregarded. The witch allows the audience to acquire a new thinking tool, a perspective of the ‘Other’, a lens of an alien anthropologist, which has legitimacy to critique existing socio-political matters and create radical rituals with everyday technologies. Into the Ethereal intends to show how the lens of non-conformist cyberwitches can be applied into practice for creating new means of critique, de-naturalisation, empowerment and activism.
The project responds to the current proliferation of witchcraft in social media spaces which suggests a desire for new ways of creating connection, existential meaning and self care. Inspired by contemporary practices of Tumblr witchcraft, Into the Ethereal plays with the languages and semiology of information and communication technologies, such as file systems, data storage or social networks. For these speculative witches digital witchcraft becomes a creative material and outlet for inclinations, which allows for the release of social discomfort and frustration towards capitalist hegemony. The spatiality of Photoshop, code and social media allow for new worlds to be created and current realities modified, where witchcraft becomes a participatory, political action that challenges the status quo and empowers the creation of “glitches that refuse, mobilise and encrypt” (Russell, 2020). The different sets of semiotics, languages and constructs inherent in witchcraft provide the designer with a way to estrange familiarity and disassemble the conventions and interfaces of digital technologies, making it possible to regard everyday objects and practices through a new perspective. The practice of digital witchcraft in Into the Ethereal lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience of digital technology and creates new intimate relationships and views on the affordances these technologies provide.
The project is an exploration of witchcraft as a methodology to envision futures where relationships with technological systems are re-imagined, critiqued and defamiliarised through spiritual practice. The project uses experimental realism as a fictocritical method of storytelling and speculation, where it provokes more questions than it suggests answers. However, its value perhaps does not lie in the speculation of future rituals and attitudes towards technological fossils, but rather in its ability to unveil the questions around digital spiritual practice that are currently unheard and situate them in public discourse. We might be tempted to ask why should we care or discuss the mortality or immortality of internet decay and most importantly why would we ever return to it? The use of speculative rituals around abandoned technology could allow an audience to think through the present and its implications on issues that might magnify in the future and values of separate togetherness, digital immortality and digital existence that might become stronger with the future to come. Through this project I intend to think about how speculative rituals provoke discussion on the nature, use and consequences of information technology and new media. By using ‘broken world thinking’ (Jackson, 2014, p.221) and world building techniques, this project explores how social worlds could react to and make claims about the nature of technological fossils, through a nostalgic appreciation of the limits and temporality of the worlds we inhabit.
Nella Piatek / MA Interaction Design / London College of Communication, 2020-21
Nella Piatek is a designer and researcher studying systems of human interaction, anthropological futures and socio-technical imaginaries. Her focus lies in creating poetic, introspective and ritualistic work, which touches upon the themes of faith, impermanence, and the infinite search for a sense of self.
speculative design, digital witchcraft, cyberwitches, Internet, rituals, interactive fiction, digital technologies, futures, social media, externalisation.
