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NET ART
ANTHOLOGY

Psycho Nymph Exile

Porpentine Charity Heartscape

2016 - 2017

Described by the artist as “a multimedia survival kit for another dimension,” Psycho Nymph Exile is a fractured sci-fi narrative that plays out across multiple platforms. The work includes a novella (ebook and print), two interactive poems, a sticker set of a three-irised eye, a website featuring Porpentine’s photography, and an online portal to extra hidden stories that visitors can unlock by entering keywords from the book.

This exploded publication can be thought of as an extension of the possibilities of hypertext, an experimental practice bridging literature and art that took shape in the 1980s and 1990s. Psycho Nymph Exile uses the fragmentary, nonlinear qualities of hypertext to evoke the subjective experience of trauma, extending it via multiple pathways across a range of media.

“I really hate this world and so when I make something I’m making something I can bear to live in.”

— Porpentine Charity Heartscape

Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Probiotic River Therapy, 2016. Interactive 3D poem. Screenshot, 2018.

VISIT PSYCHO NYMPH EXILE

This work—the novella in particular—includes content that may be upsetting for a wide range of reasons.Instructions for enabling sound on Chrome, on Safari.

Psycho Nymph Exile summons a surreal bricolage of sci-fi imagery, smut, horror, and magical thinking.

The novella is a romance between two women—“disgraced biomech pilot” Vellus Sadowary and Isidol, a formerly magical girl who has been robbed of her powers—both suffering from a trauma-induced disease.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Psycho Nymph Exile, London: Arcadia Missa, 2016. Limited edition print publication.

It takes place a tightly regimented society, where state IDs are tarot decks, PTSD is concretized as a color-coded energy source, and, in Heartscape’s words, “flashback spurt[s] from [Vellus’s] cock like a broken glass slushy.”

This world is brought to vivid life through a 3D poem, Probiotic River Therapy, built on the platform Twine. The poem is a non-linear narrative moved along by viewers’ choices. The poem appears on an abstract, interactive computer-generated landscape.

VISIT PROBIOTIC RIVER THERAPY
Instructions for enabling sound on Chrome, on Safari.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Probiotic River Therapy, 2016. Interactive 3D poem. Screenshot, 2018.

Trauma—both the initial experience of violence and the ongoing horror of a community’s refusal to acknowledge it—splinters time and space, and Psycho Nymph Exile gives form to this cognitive state by making sophisticated use of the splintered temporal and spatial qualities of hypertext.

It is a sprawling warren of scenes, theories, and declarations, flashbacks and feedback loops, woven together in a complex structure that communicates the pain of embodiment, exile, and the search for belonging.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Girlbeam, 2016. Hypertext poem. Screenshot, 2018, Google Chrome.

“She sees another hormone cyborg on the street ahead of her, black strap top hanging off the shoulder, bare legs under a pink tennis skirt. Recognizes her by the burning hotter to make up for having never burnt at all, the body that distorts reality around it, shattering images in its wake.”

More From CHAPTER 4: 2011-2016

08/24/18 Untitled/Clefa Devin Kenny 2013
08/31/18 Image Objects Artie Vierkant 2011 - ongoing
09/14/18 Ethira Amalia Ulman 2013
11/16/18 Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism) Zach Blas 2015
11/30/18 I'm Here and There Jonas Lund 2011
02/14/19 Sister Unn’s Bunny Rogers & Filip Olszewski 2011 - 2012
02/05/19 Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom K-hole & Box 1824 2013
02/08/19 Consciousness Engine 2: absentfatherbot Bogosi Sekhukhuni 2013
02/19/19 Material Speculation: Isis Morehshin Allahyari 2015 - 2016
02/21/19 Death Imitates Language Harm van den Dorpel 2016 - ongoing
03/12/19 I’m that angel Tyler Coburn 2011 - ongoing
03/21/19 /INB4/ Liz Mputu & /inb4/ 2014 - ongoing
03/21/19 #PAYBLACKTiME RaFia Santana 2016 - ongoing
05/17/19 Image Atlas Taryn Simon with Aaron Swartz 2012 - ongoing
05/17/19 Mexiconceptual H̶E̶R̶I̶B̶E̶R̶T̶O̶ Y̶é̶p̶e̶z̶ (Satélite) 2016
06/30/19 Daily Times (Performer) Siebren Versteeg 2012
06/30/19 AGNES Cécile B. Evans 2013 - 2014
06/04/19 DIS Images DIS (LAUREN BOYLE, SOLOMON CHASE, MARCO ROSO, DAVID TORO, AND COLLABORATORS) 2013
06/30/19 The Game: The Game Angela Washko 2016 - 2019

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