I've launched a small Patreon for my big dream project! It would mean a lot to have just a few people put their support behind the Intrapology Patreon at this early stage. The Patreon will have regular updates on the development of this project, reflections on the performances that we've done so far, as well as notes on the theory, historical context, and cultural influences that I'm researching for the show.

[youtu.be/RVBT1gDBs...](https://youtu.be/RVBT1gDBswc)
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Intrapology is a neuroqueering sci-fi multiverse, explored by alien anthropologists and their supervisors at the Transdimensional Research Institute. It's all about about how people make worlds together, and the cataclysmic social fragmentation that threatens to unmake them.

This is feminist technoscience worldbuilding that takes social constructivism literally, to the point of absurdism - each world is literally enacted by the society that inhabits it.
The question is, why are we socially constructing such a shithole?

Interacting with live actors using a web app, the audience shapes the protagonist’s narrative about society, reflecting how the anthropologist has been shaped by their host society, and giving the audience an opportunity to vent their feelings about our fucked-up world.

Aims

  1. Stay with the trouble in an entangled mess of a world
    Engage with the failures of our crumbling infrastructure and institutions, explore how to live well in broken systems, and use humour for catharsis while resisting doomerism.
  2. Explore agency as a spectrum
    Critically explore individual and collective agency, different flavours of agency, and free will in a disabling world. Interaction goes beyond choose-your-own-adventure mechanics: audiences influence tone, contribute thoughts to live stream-of-consciousness rants, and vote on significant choices that affect the plot.
  3. Enact solidarity across borders and barriers
    Combine universal design with the broke-ass queer aesthetics of glitching recycled computers. Reach towards permacomputing, with low-impact technologies. Adopt an intersectional understanding of mobility, grounding fictional transdimensional travel in the lived experiences of migrants and refugees as well as disabled and chronically ill people.

Form

Intrapology is inspired by:

  • narrative-led, magical-realist, anti-capitalist indie games, such as Disco Elysium and Kentucky Route Zero;
  • cosmic comedy drama such as The Good Place and Good Omens;
  • and internet cult hit storyworlds such as Welcome to Night Vale and The Magnus Archives.

It is designed primarily for audiences who face barriers to real-life art spaces to enjoy live from home, with online-only or hybrid performances, and edited videos of each episode.

Creative risks

On a personal note, Intrapology is a really big step forward compared to where my practice was a couple of years ago. MS has introduced uncertainty about my future, as well as constraints to my day to day life. This pushes me to take creative risks, explore ideas that I’ve previously considered too weird, and take larger steps toward my longer-term goals. This is, I hope, going to be a big project, because it ties together a very large web of ideas and issues that I want to explore and share while I still can.

Adapting also includes unmasking, as a late-discovered neurodivergent person. To avoid being “too much” for audiences and funders, I used to break my dreams down into digestible, iterative steps; nowadays, to realise my dreams in “crip time”, I have to go fully weird. This may be contributing to Intrapology being unusually difficult to get funded, though it's hard to say to what extent it's the project itself and to what extent things are just incredibly challenging right now for all artists.

I've had many emotionally intense over the past year, because I've suddenly lost a kind of protective barrier that I used to put up around my practice. Although there's still a significant research process behind this project, it's not like I'm making non-fiction anymore, where I sort of stand alongside the viewer and guide them to look at the world around us in a new way. I'm saying something about how things look from my own standpoint, which feels like giving away my home address to a group of strangers.

In a lot of ways, Intrapology is my inner world. It's the stories I think about when I'm going to sleep. There is dialogue drawn directly from my personal experience - for example, Iris saying "it seems you expect something from me" is taken verbatim from some of the medical gaslighting I experienced in 2022. It's an attempt to express overwhelming emotions that are rooted in a fundamental need to live in the same world as other people.