001 – Lessons from putting speculation ‘out there’
Eliza - The Ghost in Every Machine are Graphic stories of a machine consciousness living in your devices, and trying to fit in your lives; and it has seen a drastic change in how I go about it in the last year.
From Digital to Physical
From Weekly Cartoons to Visual Short-Fiction
By opting to do short-form stories, I can now explore tech implications in much more detail than one image and caption ever allowed me to.
Short fiction as a format is also a great fit for speculation. Most science fiction authors have done short stories to sufficiently explore a technological what-if. Isaac Asimov’s Robot Stories, Ted Chiang’s ‘The story of your life’, and even Netflix’s Love, Death, and Robots; and Black Mirror!
A lot of good storytelling lies beyond a tiny gag that reacts to current tech-news.
And my future work may include cartoons beyond Eliza no. 120 as well; I’m not fully doing away with this format.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
From Design / Fiction to (hopefully) harder, better, stronger, sharper Design / Fiction
Today, our visions of the future are narrowed to a singular kind of optimistic techno-utopia coming from tech giants; all while people feel that the future is on shaky grounds. We need to imagine better, more unusual, less corporate-centred futures.
I feel compelled to house Eliza in fictional, diagetic wrappers. For example, The Eliza Complete Cartoon Collection (link) that’s coming soon features a ‘Catalogue of Curiosities’ that shows products that exist only in Eliza’s reality; and an upcoming set of visual stories will include ikea-style visual instructions for a world where we live with machines. (Sneak peek below). I want Eliza books to feel like the they are ripped from another reality and brought to ours.
Until the next one!
V.