The Fog
By: Chelsea Thompto
A digital projects commission for the:
Overview
This work is comprised of 3 "acts" exploring our relationship to fog as a society and the potential for fog to serve as a positive role model for trans embodiment. Each act is built as a procedurally generated 3D space using three.js. The work has been designed as an website without ads or tracking and with intentionally open source code. Sustainability and accessibility also informed the design choices for the site.
Statement
This body of work centers around the politics of knowledge making, data collection, and trans visibility through an exploration of fog as a common subject/trope of horror narratives as well as metaphor used in military strategy. The questions driving this work include:
Why has fog been figured as a menace in the popular imagination? Can fog be an aspirational figure for trans embodiment and resistance? What would embodiment styled after fog feel and look like?
Drawing on work by Susan Stryker (My Words To Victor Frankenstein…) around the idea of trans identity and the monstrous, the work questions how subjects are perceived as monstrous and what the process says about the societies that produce them. Instead of investing in assimilation as a goal, this work seeks to imagine new trans futures constructed outside of cis-centric models of being.
The work makes extensive use of ASCII art stylization. This style is used to break away from an emphasis on graphic fidelity as an indicator of quality.value, to further accentuate the computational nature of the scenes, and because of the way ASCII art changes subtly across browsers and resists standardize documentation via screenshot.
This project has been separated into 3 acts. I am calling them "acts" because each composition has been structured as a stage of sorts, each with its own mode of interaction and set of relational elements. Some elements in each act are procedurally generated, meaning that their shape, position, content, or other features are generated via code every time the page is loaded. This allows the work to have an element of controlled randomness which I find useful for creating these stages meant for contemplation over narrative. Each act focuses on a different aspect of the fog research:
Act 1
Act 1
From foghorns to the “fog of war” to military efforts to disperse fog, the phenomenon has long been at odds with militaristic and capitalistic ideas of progress and control. In obscuring coasts, roads, and runways, fog denies us the situational awareness upon which so much of contemporary life is built. In its denial of ocular slight, fog highlights the value we place on seeing as knowing and opens up space to consider who gets to see and to what ends do they use that sight?
This scene is viewed using an orbiting camera similar to those found in 3D modeling and map software. The audio in this scene mimics (in a digital and distorted fashion) the sound of fog horns on the coast. The texts for this scene are drawn from scientific papers about fog dispersal, military texts about the fog or war, and economic texts about fog's negative impact. Taken together, these elements are meant to render fog as a subject to be scrutinized.
Act 2
Act 2
As both trope and figure itself, fog has featured prominently across horror narratives as landscape, harbinger, co-conspirator, and monster. Whether drifting through tombstones in a graveyard, engulfing a fearful protagonist, or spawning inexplicable horrors, our fear of the unknown is often made manifest by fog. This too exposes the value we place on seeing as knowing and offers us the opportunity to relish in the unknown and unseeable.
This scene is viewed using controls similar to those found in contemporary 3D video games. The ground and sky are churning masses of fog with the dark mass in the sky vacillating between figure and ground as the camera moves through the space. Texts drawn from horror narratives featuring fog arise out of the ground in random places and are uttered in a low and slurring voice as the texts rise into the fog. The space is also populated by rectilinear building like forms which, unlike the fog masses and texts, are impacted by another layer of computational fog. The resulting effect is that of an abandoned yet alive space.
Act 3
Act 3
As something both visible and obscuring, considering fog as a positive model of being in the world opens up new pathways for being in the world as a trans person. Might I, as a trans person, be seen for who I am yet still with the right and power of obscurity? As fog resists the logic of seeing as knowing, might being like fog open up a space for feeling as knowing or being as knowing? To be in the world as fog is: ephemeral yet seen, visible yet difficult to capture, known yet expanding the possibilities of the unknown.
This scene is the only one in which the viewer can actively alter the objects in the space. Featuring cycling texts written by me, which must be exposed by moving fog sections, this final act offers provocations for imagining new and radically different ways of being trans in the world.
More Info
The source code for the site, including an extended version of this text can be found here:
https://github.com/cthompto/the-fog-sjma
Demo videos for each act can be viewed here: