Fractalize 1: I've loved you from afar

FRACTALIZE is a hypermedia fiction project created by Tony Vieira, with Lesley Loksi Chan and Arthur Yeung. The first installment, ”I've loved you from Afar,” is a fractal reminiscence of a romance across space and time. Created for Supercrawl 2017, a four day art and indie music festival in Hamilton, Canada, Fractalize is intended to exist both inside a gallery space as much as within the audience member’s smartphone. Narrative “fractals” will be delivered over the course of the five day ELO Conference and Festival via email and social media, with intentional knowledge gaps that users fill in based on their own experience, anxieties, and desires. Users experience the project in the form of VR/360º video gallery exhibit, video walks, web videos, photographs, original music, text messages, sound art, Spotify playlists, and social media posts. Characters within the narrative have their own social media identities which are regularly updated over the course of the exhibition, creating a blurring of the lines that separate reality and virtuality. One user described an element of the experience as “swimming in a story that I was watching, but also starring in.”