Micha Cárdenas, Provost Fellow and PhD candidate in Media Arts + Practice (iMAP) at University of Southern California, has found yet another use for Scalar: interactive storytelling. In her latest project, Redshift and Portalmetal, Cárdenas uses Scalar to combine film, performance and poetry into an online interactive game.

Readers (or perhaps, users or players) are prompted at key junctures within the narrative and given the choice to move along diverse paths, to choose the action within the story: leave Earth or stay; prepare for your trip or just flee; go to the Ice Planet or go to the Ocean Moon.

The story asks readers to confront choices made in the wake of apocalyptic climate change. But ultimately, according to Cárdenas, Redshift and Portalmetal, “uses space travel as a lens through which to understand the experience of migration and settlement for a trans woman of color [and] points to possibilities of post-digital, post-media, and decolonial approaches to communication.”

Each page of the story contains minimal textual narrative; underneath that text, arresting yet calming, sci-fi-scenic footage flows the full width of the browser window. The effect is quite spectacular and quite engaging.

Cárdenas coordinated all the filming for these shots in Los Angeles and Toronto and also wrote the text and performed the movement for the project.

This fall, Cárdenas will join the University of Washington, Bothell as an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.

See Redshift and Portalmetal here. See Micha Cárdenas here.