Dots and Dashes

2006
Immersive VR environment
Collaborative project with Ben Chang

Dots and Dashes is an interactive narrative in virtual reality for the CAVE and head-mount displays. The piece is loosely based on the book “Wired Love – A Romance in Dots and Dashes,” written in the 1860’s by a former telegraph operator, Ella Cheever Thayer, about online romance and heartbreak between telegraph operators. If we think of cyberspace as an alternate space mediated by electronic technology, then the telegraph network could be described as the first cyberspace. Beyond just the technology itself, much of the social impact of the telegraph networks prefigures the impact of the internet today – and exploring this history is a way of gaining understanding of our current technological moment. In Dots and Dashes, the viewer travels through a series of spaces, unfolding from the physical space of the telegraph office, into an imagined version of William Gibson’s “consensual hallucination” on the telegraph wire.