Hyperrhiz 27

Introduction: Blanket Forts and Other Assemblages

Daniel Lichtman
St. John‘s University

Catalina Jordan Alvarez
Fordham University

Sue Huang
Rutgers University

Lee Tusman
State University of New York, Purchase College

Citation: Lichtman, Daniel, et. al. “Introduction: Blanket Forts and Other Assemblages.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 27, 2024. doi:10.20415/hyp/027.i01

Abstract: An introduction to Blanket Forts and Other Assemblages, a special issue of Hyperrhiz.

Keywords: community, worldbuilding, virtual environments, storytelling, 3D collage.

Blanket Forts and Other Assemblages, a special issue of Hyperrhiz, is presented as a series of virtual 3D worlds, playable through a web browser. Projects were selected from an open call, in which contributors were prompted to create interactive worlds inspired by the idea of the houseboat, campsite, terrarium, diorama and other varieties of constructed environments, either real or imagined, that facilitate new modalities of intimacy and collectivity.

Using the Community Game Development Toolkit (CGDT), contributors created navigable 3D spaces consisting of photos, drawings, 3D scans and audio recordings to create interactive environments that register a patchwork of traces of their belongings and bodies. The CGDT, created by artist and researcher Daniel Lichtman, is a set of highly accessible tools for the Unity Game engine that takes a collage-based approach to building interactive 3D worlds. The toolkit is designed for artists, activists, researchers, students and community members to create 3D environments with a low- and no-code approach to interactive storytelling and worldbuilding. The visually abstract approach to worldbuilding facilitated by the toolkit provides intuitive tools for members of diverse communities to create non-linear audio-visual representations of their own traditions, rituals, heritages and life-experiences.

The resulting projects in this special issue of Hyperrhiz demonstrate how collage-based worldbuilding can facilitate new poetic possibilities in virtual storytelling. These digital spaces include make-shift geoships, ancestral homes, small gardens, exploratoriums and bisexual bedrooms. Projects explore how memories, intimate spaces, and architectural bodies can be reconstituted in virtual space—here, fragments of our past may tell us something about our possible futures. Many of these reconstitutions are partial— 3D assets are glitched, scans are incomplete, bodies (both human/nonhuman and architectural) are both there and not there (erased, as they were).

In Camille Intson’s work Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries, Intson reconstructs her bedroom as a “queered” liminal space, laying out a temporal journey of identity. Elizabeth Leister’s My Garland is Also Blue and Bahareh Khoshooe’s Thoughts and Prayers from a Glowing Rectangle invoke entangled and untangled family memories. Ash Eliza Smith, Samantha Bendix and Daniel Lichtman’s In the Middle of It All: Collective Futuring in the Panhandle of Nebraska and Kristin McWharter’s Incantations for a Competitive Spirit speak to the ways in which we may manifest collectively in assembled environments. David Han explores ideas of the collective, but in the form of reconstructed online archives in The Garden of Network Delights. There are geographical assemblages—both fictional, as in Parson & Charlesworth’s Eco-Fables: Tales of Multispecies Inc., which portals us through multispecies worlds, and Oneiromancy – Divination through Dreams by Buena Onda Collective (Dominika Ksel & Camila A. Morales), in which community members reimagine an aquatic environment in the face of climate crisis, as well as a ‘real’ assemblage, as in Mitchell Palczewski’s Gare de Vector3 work, which transports us to an imagined moment in time in France. There are individual dreamscapes that explore emotional interiorities, as in Eva Davidova’s It Keeps Seeing You and Abby Grobbel’s Sanctuary.

In this COVID and post-COVID time period, experiences of community gathering, intimacy and connectedness take place increasingly within virtual spaces, and communication and social connectivity are ever more shaped by algorithmically driven social media platforms. The projects in Blanket Forts and Other Assemblages collectively imagine the virtual as a space in which digital collage traverses connections between human and inhuman bodies, material environments and individual and collective memories. Storytelling within this space reflects on, and refracts, our experiences of the past, and suggests speculative forms of intimacy and collectivity for the future.