Join us Tuesday March 26 at 12:30pm for WILDWOOD: BlackDH Adventures in Southside Chicago Worldmaking, a lecture featuring Elizabeth Murice Alexander.
From the archive to the screen, Black digital humanists regularly engage hypertext literature and interactive media as tools of social justice-based creative placemaking.
In this presentation, Alexander examines the use of interactive media for Black community worldbuilding and presents her own work in this area. WILDWOOD, a Black solarpunk digital gamebook, visions life in a rewilded future version of West Englewood, a neighborhood on the southside of Chicago. In the game, Alexander incorporates elements of choose-your-own-adventure storytelling and tabletop gaming to explore community histories and futures through adventures in Black speculative worldbuilding, while also experimenting with hypertext fiction and AI image generation as digital placemaking tools. As such, WILDWOOD offers tools to write future visions of Black communities, and space to enact these visions through digital play.