BlueSuburbia
A rediscovery of digital poetry as an immersive experience
BlueSuburbia is an interactive literature project that first went online in 1999 and quickly gained cult status. As one of the defining net art works of that time, it combined poetry with animated environments that led visitors through dreamlike landscapes. Until 2005, the Flash page grew and changed continuously until the end of Flash silenced it. Now, BlueSuburbia is being relaunched and once again invites you to not only read poems, but to wander through them. The work moves between beauty and horror, between personal strength and a world that is threatened. Playful and poetic, it opens spaces in which demons are confronted, darkness seems overwhelming, and yet an inner light provides orientation. BlueSuburbia thus becomes a journey through a “beautiful horror” that is both an intimate reflection and an immersive experience – a work that carries its history from the early days of the web into the present.
Nathalie Lawhead is a game designer and developer of experimental software whose work is reminiscent of the iconography of early web design and computer technology. She has been creating interactive computer art since the late 90s and is responsible for various net art works that culminate in her current work. Her most notable projects include Everything is Going to Be OK (an interactive zine in the style of a black comedy) and Tetrageddon Games (an online arcade full of strange internet curiosities). Her works are in the collection of MoMA in New York and are shown in the Rhizome Artbase, among others. She is passionate about the electronic world, cyberspace, broken systems, the profound poetry of computer errors, glitch art, desktop pets, strange freeware, and the beautiful existential horror of our digital world.