The Spectral Dollhouse
Cross section of the dollhouse.
The Spectral Dollhouse is a digital dollhouse where readers conjure my writing as ghosts as they navigate the digitized space with a virtual planchette. The dollhouse is an experiment in “narrative transmography” in which the reader creates a cross pollination between fiction, poetry, as well scholarly analysis of monsters and the monstrous. This was dissertation project for my Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California.
It was published by The New River where it will subsequently be preserved as a “significant site for future generations” by the Library of Congress’s Internet Archive Project.
I won three competitive fellowships that helped me complete my dissertation, including a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from USC, a university-wide competition.
Artist’s Statement
I believe in the portable, collaborative, and viral magic of born-digital texts. My first book-length new media project, The Spectral Dollhouse, is a physical dollhouse I built and staged death scenes of real and fictional women inside (from Mary Shelley to “the Madwoman in the Attic”). I then photographed the rooms and used Adobe Flash to animate the space. Making connections between concepts is a creative act, so the linearity is less important than the hypertextual connections the reader makes between the rooms. As you explore the space, my writing is conjured as apparitions: fiction haunts non-fiction. The photographs of the death scenes are meant to explore the photo as a representation of reality, as well as symbolize literary oppression that women face in regards to the procreation of their stories and bodies.
In November 2013, “The Cyborg in the Basement Manifesto,” my hybrid essay combining excerpts from the dollhouse, memoir, and narrative theory, went live alongside work from Donna Haraway in the feminist science fiction issue of Ada: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology. Click here to learn more.
Donna Haraway in the kitchen with the tea.
Competitive fellowships that funded my dissertation:
Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship, USC, 2011-2012.
Continuing Fellowship for Literature and Creative Writing, USC, 2009-2010.
Fisher Center Predoctoral Fellowship in Gender & Animation, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2008-2009.