Playwright Kat Mustatea's 'Voidopolis' - Dante's Inferno in Covid-era NYC

In Voidopolis, transmedia playwright and artist, Kat Mustatea, presents a one-of-a kind, augmented reality book set in New York City during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mustatea, who was born in Bucharest and immigrated to the U.S. with her family in the 80’s, began this unique project by first, deleting every post from her Instagram account, and then telling her story, one post at a time. As she explains it, “[I] created a, kind of, stage on which the story was going to unfold, which was my feed, and I started retelling Dante’s Inferno, kind of chapter by chapter, post by post, but doing it in a very specific, peculiar way. I was using language that didn’t contain the letter “e.” So, I used no words that contained “e” and I had thought of this, writing with constraints, was a thing I had been interested in before, but the specific notion of doing it for this project was something not even technical, it was actually emotional, because I felt that the story I was telling was very much about loss. I really felt as if I was witnessing loss all around me, like literally people disappearing off the streets of New York and disappearing into hospitals and not coming back out, but also daily life, kind of disappearing…” With the help of a modified GPT-2 text generator, she was able to compose sentences that followed that particular rule. For her, “…the idea to write in such a way that the letter “e” was missing was a way to literally embed the sense of loss into the language itself, and something really interesting happens when you’re avoiding the letter “e.” Every past tense verb, the regular past tense verb in English, ends in -ed and so you don’t really have access to the past. It felt as if that caused the story to have this strange time warp which also was, in fact, expressive of how it felt to live through that time where we were in a suspended animation.”

Within the augmented reality portion of Voidopolis, Mustatea also wanted to incorporate the idea of loss, just as she did when eliminating the letter “e.” She decided to create her book in a way that the contents disappear, or “decay,” over the course of a year. A reader would first buy the physical book and as they are reading, the images and words become masked and unintelligible. In order to continue reading, the reader would have to use an agumented reality app. With that app, the text and images can then be read and seen, but only temporarily. Eventually, the digital components of the app begin to fade over several months and what’s left are words that are obscured and that continue to decay over the rest of the year until it can no longer be read. Fortunately, the book does reset every year on July 1st, which is the date Mustatea started telling her story, and the text is legible again for a short while, and then the decaying process begins all over again. She explained, “Your book is doing this, you know, it’s a kind of digital performance… it’s like decaying for you in front of you.” After experiencing the book in its entirety, Mustatea hopes readers will walk away with “…the idea that even in the middle of collapse, there’s a way of resisting collapse by speaking about it, by describing it, by believing in the power of language to change reality.”