(In)Visible Cities

(In)Visible Cities. 2025.

Built in Twine, with images and video co-created with Midjourney. AR augmentations via the Halo AR App. (You will need to download the Halo AR  app, iOS & Android.)

Created for the MIX 2025 Writing With Technologies. MIX Conference. Bath, UK.

For All CatKind (@FurAllCatkind) began early Feb. 2024 as a response to the current bifurcation of (social) media coverage of world crises. The initial series of Midjourney images envision life in an idyllic seaside town, cats in their daily lives, with flying kites, picnicking, donkey carts, and market day. Posted to Instagram, two accounts now run divergent trajectories. On @Sioflynn, the joys of daily life continue. On @FurAllCatkind scenes of intensifying tragedy mediate unfolding events (Ukraine, Beersheba, Gaza, Sudan, Noumea, Tehran...). 

These divergent and shared storyworlds recontextualize Instagram’s uncritical juxtaposition of cats and catastrophes. Midjourney’s capacity for alterity and alienation of the nostalgic familiar can at times unsettle the normalization of dehumanization. Here, CatKind, as proxies for the LOLcat ambassadors of the internet, are remediations of what currently can’t yet be addressed directly online or IRL.

This new interactive project layers two storyworlds, the visible image and the layered AR, to reflect on the ongoing schism of living in safety and bearing witness from afar.

Full image credits for Public Domain images from the J.P. Getty Digital Collection are noted at the end of the work. All other images and videos were co-created with Midjourney.