Voidopolis

Kat Mustatea

2020—ongoing

Voidopolis by Kat Mustatea is a digital performance about loss and memory currently unfolding as part of her Instagram feed (@kmustatea). The artwork Voidopolis uses an algorithm to wipe humans out of stock photographs. Mustatea explores the ideas of disembodiment, loss, and memory within the digital space. What is the human form after numerous iterations online? What is lost in algorithms? What do we remember from social media posts?

The digital performance started on July 1, 2020 as a loose retelling of Dante’s Inferno, informed by the grim experience of wandering through NYC during a pandemic. Instead of the poet Virgil, the guide is a caustic hobo named Nikita. This piece is meant to culminate in loss, so the digital performance Voidopolis will eventually be deleted from the Instagram feed once the narrative is finished. By ultimately disappearing, Mustatea makes a case for the collective amnesia that follows cataclysm.

Artist Bio

Kat Mustatea is playwright and technologist whose language and performance works engage absurdity, hybridity, and the uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human. Her TED talk, about puppets and algorithms, untangles the meaning of machines making art. She is a co-curator of EdgeCut, a live performance series that explores our complex relationship to the digital, and a member of NEW INC, the art and tech incubator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Her most recent work, Voidopolis, won the 2020 Arts and Letters “Unclassifiable” Prize for Literature, received a literary grant from the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation, and was featured at the 2020 Ars Electronica Festival.

IG: @kmustatea