The NEXT and the Electronic Literature Lab are pleased to present, “Vision Unbound,” an exhibition taking place during Women's History Month, that honors the genius of four women—Melody Mou Peijing, Amira Hanafi, Priti Pandurangan, and Marisa Parham—whose art challenges us to rethink the possibilities of the digital medium and our perspective of the world.
Mou Peijing (Melody)'s “At Nightfall, the Goldfish,” awarded the 2021 New Media Writing Prize “Writing Magazine Student Award,” experiments with structure for making interconnections among five seemingly disparate characters: a young boy, flower shop owner, angler, neighbor, and a goldfish. Water ripples throughout the story's unfolding, harkening us to the expansiveness of life—and time.
"A Dictionary of the Revolution," an interactive, multi-vocal piece, chronicles the “evolving language” of the years-long revolutionary period through the voices of hundreds of people who were recorded in 2014. The website contains 125 texts which are woven from transcriptions of this speech. Following its publication, the work was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2018 New Media Writing Prize.
The epic Sanskrit love poem "Meghadūtam" is reimagined for the digital medium by Priti Pandurangan in this work of net art. Narrated in six parts, her visual poem swirls in circular patterns on the screen like the cloud sent by the nature spirit to deliver a message to his distant love. We participate in his longing, “bring[ing] his words to life” through our interactions.
A “choreo-essay,” Marisa Parham's “.break .dance” is a mash up of images, video, animation, and text inhabiting “spaces of possibility” around, across, and beyond the screen. As such, the work performs resistance to the norms that have arisen around the production (and experiencing) digital texts as it itself “resist[s] assimilation back into circuits of knowledge and being — practices and institutions—founded alongside slavery itself.”