Mummy Hood Nesting Forest

Steans, David ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0153-8983 (2022) Mummy Hood Nesting Forest. [Creative Project]

Abstract

The output is a creative project. Mummy Hood Nesting Forest (Steans 2022) is a digital artwork that takes the form of a website incorporating text, sound, graphics and 3D animation. Research Process: Steans was invited to produce a new work for online presentation by Primary, Nottingham. A macabre story about storytelling, preparedness, and packable techwear, Mummy Hood Nesting Forest uses the provisional scenario of a hiker getting lost in the woods to conjure, recur, rewrite, and exhume. The website functions both as a specific context informing the story and a contrived situation for engaging with it. Accompanied by 3D animation, graphics, and acousmatic music, the injunction to get lost – in the forest, in the narrative, in the text itself — is accentuated by the design of the site. The work develops Steans' ongoing practice-led research around hybrid narrative writing, genre (particularly horror) and media technologies. Research Insights: Mummy Hood Nesting Forest is a work of hybrid writing that uses specific media processes (html, flash, 3d animation, graphic design) to accent, distort and "creatively obstruct" (Sutcliffe 2022) the audience's reading experience. Steans 'sites' the macabre story in the titular forest, which is conflated with the website itself. The central narrative stalls, stutters, and restarts like a struggling webpage, and the site is rigged with dead ends, trapdoors and "decaying 'user experience' tropes[, working] to absorb the reader by incorporating echoes of their browsing disorientations directly into the story". (Sutcliffe 2022) Dissemination: The work was presented at www.mummyhoodnestingforest.com [accessible online as of Sep 2023]. An related expression of the work was commissioned by Primary on their plinth facade (March-August 2023). Steans discussed the work in a panel at the symposium a-n Assembly (Potter, Steans, Russell, 30-31 March 2023). It was reviewed in the Dec-Jan 22/23 issue of Art Monthly (Sutcliffe 2022)

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