Jentery's Contemporary Media and Fiction Blog

Also available in the Electronic Literature Collection, Porpentine and Brenda Neotenomie’s With Those We Love Alive (2014; WTWLA) is a “weirdfem dark fantasy where you design artifacts for a skull empress. It was made in Twine. Sometimes you draw on yourself with marker.” Brief bios for both artists appear alongside the work in the ELC: “Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s games and curation have contributed to the popularity of the accessible game design software Twine. She’s won the XYZZY and Indiecade awards, had her work displayed at EMP Museum and The Museum of the Moving Image, and been profiled by the New York Times, commissioned by Vice and Rhizome, and she is a 2016 Creative Capital Emerging Fields awardee. Brenda Neotenomie is a composer, graphic artist, and game designer. Her works include Bellular Hexatosis and the OST [original soundtrack] for With Those We Love Alive,” which was written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can download all the work’s source files, if you wish.

The work begins by breaking the fourth wall with the following reminder, written in second-person: “nothing you can do is wrong.” This reminder echoes Marina Kittaka’s Secrets Agent (discussed in Chapter 1) as it bypasses, or at least complicates, the assumption that games and fictions are always challenges with solutions. Players (who could also be called readers, audiences, or “you”) are then asked to select which month they are born in. Twelve options are listed; among them are “Five, the Angel’s Egg” and “Eight, the Snake’s Milk.” Next, players select the “element” and eye colour for their player character (the protagonist), whose pronouns are she / her. This protagonist is given a name by her parents, but she then decides to a select from a book a different name for herself (“Cade Umdor,” for example; the name depends on the player’s initial choices). This moment is a key dimension of how trans lives are represented in WTWLA and all of Porpentine’s writing.34 Once the player character chooses her name, she is visited by an “agent” of the “Skull Empress.” She leaves her apartment to live in the Empress’s palace, where she has her own chambers and is expected to share the products of her talents as an artificer.

This work of science fiction was originally published in 2004 and written by Nalo Hopkinson, who begins her bio like so: “I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1960, to Freda and Slade. My brother Keita came in 1966. My birth family has lived in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, the U.S, and Canada.” Hopkinson is currently a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

A lot happens in “Message in a Bottle,” but one way to approach it is through the lens of media studies. Media are often understood as messengers: conduits or containers like bottles yet also tricksters or guides. At one point near the end of the story, Kamla reminds us of this trickster history: “Sometimes interpretation is a trap. Sometimes we need to simply observe” (23). Jumping too quickly to an interpretation risks misunderstanding others and the situation; equally important, it may bypass the nuances of language and communication in favour of self-interest and immediate access to information. This risk of misunderstanding, or the desire for immediate information over nuanced communication, matters because Kamla, who is adopted by Babette and Sunil, is belittled and infantilized throughout the story, partly because she is (or appears to be) quite young: a “precocious ten” year old (17).

This work was released in 2007 and was, to my knowledge, intended for projection in a gallery setting; however, it, like most if not all of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ pieces, was also published online. YHCHI is a duo—Young-Hae Chang (from South Korea) and Marc Voge (from the U.S.)—based in Seoul. Chang is an artist and doctor of aesthetics with a Ph.D. from Universite de Paris I, and Voge is a poet with interests in modernism. Since 1999, they have composed their pieces in ActionScript and Abobe Flash, with text and audio, across at least twenty languages. The text is always written with the Monaco typeface (monospaced, sans-serif) and functions like an optical image: a projection of marks intended for impression. Their slideshow approach to media echoes Bob Dylan’s 1965 promotional video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (part of the 1967 documentary, Dont Look Back). Dylan, of course, did not use Monaco.

• Hopkinson, Nalo. "Message in a Bottle," Report from Planet Midnight, PM Press, 2012.
• Porpentine and Brenda Neotenomie. With Those We Love Alive, 2014.
• Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. M00D OF THE M0MENT, 2007.