Project by Ellie Madsen
asciiworld is a 3D web environment that explores worldbuilding, hypertext, digital ecology, and information sparsity. I experiment with visual abstraction to create a digital world that reveals itself through interaction.
The world I have created lives inside Donna Haraway’s carrier bag: characters are not written by humans as logical strings nor read by machines as binary sequences, but symbols are gathered, jumbled, and planted. Characters are stripped of meaning, semiotically void. Their affordances lie in their visual density, allowing for alternate readings: character as text, as image, as hyperlink, as word, as world.
In an era of high-resolution computer graphics and virtual realities, I inch towards the threshold at which an environment might fade into abstraction. In the gaps left behind by the absence of vivid renderings, there is space. I intend to pry this space open: to let it grow, expand, and inside, to search for its poetic capacity.
