Choose Your anceStory™

James Quinn

Choose Your anceStory™ is a web-based work of interactive fiction, intended as a meditation on how identity regarding ancestry is perceived.

Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential-realist framework, 1970s TV-play Penda’s Fen, and the artist’s recent encounter with commercial DNA testing, Choose Your anceStory™ is a computational narrative thought-experiment.

The piece invites its audience to consider how an observer’s apparatus of observation configures their perception of ancestral identity.

In its fictional world, satirical tech company Choose Your anceStory™ offers you the chance to partake in a novel DNA test, one which allows you to dial up genes from whichever part of the world you identify with most. Afterwards, you get to experience your own interactive ancestral story - your anceStory™.

Choose Your anceStory™ is technically underpinned by JavaScript, HTML and CSS scripting languages, and was built in Twine 2 using the Sugarcube format.

The audiovisual aesthetic is designed to encourage its audience to project the contents of their imagination onto the narrative and by doing so consider the performative nature of ancestral identity.

In our present cultural milieu, awash with firmly-held binary conceptions of identity, the artist hopes this piece encourages its audience to observe carefully how the conceptual boundaries that appear to divide, and define, groups of people emerge.

How to interact

Follow the link to explore Choose Your anceStory™.

See the work

James Quinn

James Quinn is an actor, writer, and computational storyteller whose practise employs performance and interactive fiction to create narrative space for his audience to consider the moment’s meaningful questions.

Today’s rapidly changing culture, catalysed by technological growth, presents unfamiliar terrain to navigate. The artist has responded by drawing on his theatrical background and newly acquired coding skill to create dark and often funny narrative experiences at the intersection of computation and story.

“Fiction has always helped us understand our environment”, he has said. “There’s much to make sense of right now, and computation is at the forefront of it”.

James was born within the sound of Bow Bells but now hears the squawk of seagulls in Brighton where we lives with his partner.

Tags
Computational resistance  Experiential array  Memory bank   interactive  narrative  playable experience  

James Quinn

James Quinn is an actor, writer, and computational storyteller whose practise employs performance and interactive fiction to create narrative space for his audience to consider the moment’s meaningful questions.

Today’s rapidly changing culture, catalysed by technological growth, presents unfamiliar terrain to navigate. The artist has responded by drawing on his theatrical background and newly acquired coding skill to create dark and often funny narrative experiences at the intersection of computation and story.

“Fiction has always helped us understand our environment”, he has said. “There’s much to make sense of right now, and computation is at the forefront of it”.

James was born within the sound of Bow Bells but now hears the squawk of seagulls in Brighton where we lives with his partner.