Playable on itch.io Created by Siobhan O’Flynn. A Hallucinatory Deformance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Co-created with ChatGPT4, DALL-E, and Midjourney. 

January 1892 - June 2024.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s biting inditement of 19th century medical “curative” practices for depression in women in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1891) is widely regarded as “a small literary masterpiece” (Hedges) and a radical feminist challenge to the erasure of women’s voices and agency. 

The hallucinatory modulations of the prose and shifting perceptions of the narrator as she obsesses on the patterns behind the patterns of the wallpaper are the catalyst for this remediation of Gilman’s claustrophobic narrative. Styled as what Jerome McGann has termed a deformance (to deform and perform anew), this digital adaptation distorts Gilman’s text, as an interactive multi-perspectival experience of braided and divergent paths, and in the augmented reality layering and interplay of AI generated visual hallucinations of Gilman’s descriptive evocations of deteriorating place and perception. 


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