Can       imagining       alternative       fictional       realities    prompt      us       to       situate       ourselves       and     our    communities       on       the       internet       differently ?



Will You Eat Me, Dutch Design Weekend, Eindhoven, October 2024.


















In a world where digital spaces shape how we express, interact, and construct our identities, Alice in Interland invites audiences—especially those deeply embedded in online culture—
            
to pause and reflect on their cyborgian presence.
This speculative fiction narrative encourages users to reconsider self-expression, sense-making, and movement across the intangible yet material spaces of the internet. By personifying digital objects and cyberspaces as active agents, the project offers a lens through which we can examine our evolving relationship with technology and reimagine how we inhabit these virtual landscapes.











Methodologies

Speculative Fabulations | FIctional Development | Participatory Design | Absurd and Surreal Literature Development


Collaborators

Team Members
(Collective Research + Narrative Building + Execution)

Sound Design -
Sonnie Carlebach


Tools and Mediums

Animation > Mixed Media Film >
Adobe Premiere Pro for VR Film Editing 








Still from Alice in Interland






< E  x  p  e  r  i  e  n  c  e >
What is Alice in Interland?
At its core, Alice in Interland is a satirical and absurdist speculative fiction narrative that critiques the entanglement of human expression with digital objects and cyberspace.

In this world, data-based digital objects—screenshots, iOS Notes, and Spotify playlists—gain agency, forming dialogues with Alice, the protagonist. This interaction unfolds as a layered audiovisual journey, blending:

Live-action performance – Alice navigating cyberspace as an embodied presence.

Hand-sketched, printed, illustrated, and modeled backgrounds – A tangible contrast to the digital realm.

Sonic storytelling & soundscapes – Narratives unfolding through surreal, musical exchanges between Alice and the digital world.

By translating digital ephemera into physical and performative elements, the project blurs the boundary between the real and the virtual, prompting audiences to reconsider their relationship with the internet not just as users, but as active participants in a constantly shifting ecosystem of selfhood.










Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’
Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’
Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’
Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’
Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’
Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’
Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’
Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’
Alice Dropping into Interland - A still from the film ‘Alice in Interland’








< S  i  g  n  a  l  s >

Why imagine an absurdist Alice in Interland to enquire humans’ developing integrations with the online?











"We are all cyborgs now." — Sherry Turkle

"A cyborg is a hybrid of social reality and fiction." — Donna Haraway

The boundary between human and machine, physical and digital, organic and synthetic has never been stable.

When Donna Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto, she introduced the cyborg as a creature of contradiction—both a social reality and a fictional myth—one that challenges the dualities that shape our socio-political systems. In contrast, Sherry Turkle suggests that our everyday entanglement with technology—the devices in our pockets, the notifications shaping our emotions, the digital traces of our existence—makes us all cyborgs by default.

If we accept that the cyborgian condition is no longer theoretical, but an everyday lived reality, what does that mean for how we experience selfhood, intimacy, and identity in digital spaces?

To study internet culture and cyberspace is to study the ways we express, construct, and dissolve our sense of being. Our interactions with screenshots, Notes apps, Spotify playlists, Instagram archives—the digital objects that frame our personal narratives—are not passive acts; they are acts of self-making, memory, and emotional archiving.


A Speculative Inquiry Into the Cyborgian Self

Alice in Interland extends this inquiry into a speculative fiction experiment, using satire, absurdism, and immersive storytelling to interrogate:

What it means to be a cyborg in an era where identity is co-authored by algorithms.

How digital objects hold memory, emotion, and agency in shaping selfhood.

How our online interactions blur the lines between human experience and machine mediation.

This project is not about forecasting a technological dystopia or utopia. Instead, it builds on conversations, interviews, workshops, and research to explore the entanglements of the organic and technological—to question our sense of self, connection, and meaning-making in the architectures of cyberspace.

















































Signal - Being Chronically Online
1.  Always,  consistently online with rising screen times, living, making, breathing the internet.

Refer here, here  



Signal  -  I Found _____ Online

2. We’re and have been, now more than ever, finding partners, friends, jobs, families, therapy, and more online. Moreover, our online live significantly infrom our offline lives. We’re “all” developing personal brands marketable over social media.

Refer here.



Signal - Like ..., Like ..., Like...
3. The internet and our digitally intertwined lives are changing the ways we communicate, and most fundamentally language as we know it.

Refer here, here, and here.







Still from Alice in Interland













< M  e  t  h  o  d
o  l  o  g  i  e  s  +  
P  r  o  c  e  s  s >



How do we imagine the surreal journey of venturing into our mobile phones?

























Chapter
One



<  Investigating the   
Materiality of Digital Objects  >


The journey of Alice in Interland unfolded through a series of deliberate research phases and creative explorations -



I began by examining how intangible digital artifacts—such as screenshots, playlists, and notes—serve as significant, material components of our daily lives. To delve deeper, I conducted interviews with Gen-Z participants, collecting personal narratives that highlighted their interactions with these digital objects.

I also organised a workshop exploring memes as digital objects that Gen-Z and millenials often use to articulate poignant events and feelings. The meme becomes a digital only visual language to unpack many discussions otherwise unable to be diiscussed without the use of added irony or humor.

Refer here.



This research illuminated how such artifacts function as extensions of identity, memory, and self-expression in contemporary digital culture.






Chapter
Two





< Reimagining Classic Narratives Through a Feminist Lens>










Building upon my previous work, which involved reinterpreting literary narratives from a feminist perspective using sound, I sought to adapt the familiar tale of Alice in Wonderland to a modern context. 

This adaptation, titled Alice in Interland, explores speculative scenarios of human-technology integration. The central question guiding this narrative was:

What if Alice—symbolizing any of us—were to fall into her smartphone and navigate the vast realms of the internet?










Based on the short story 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' by Harlan Ellison - a study in rewriting a scifi story from a woman’s perspective (within this a marginalised point of view), 'The Story of Tina', follows Tina as she is enslaved by the snetient AI system called EMOX. 



Our world systems are based on hegemonic patriarchal, capitalistic structures. These structures are so deeply entrenched in the society that they are woven into the very fabric of our existence in status quo. Our family life, sense of self, learnings, politics, culture, ecology, working life, everything is imbibed with these oppressive and biased systems. 

As these same systems are the founding fathers of new technological systems and structures of AI, I wanted to speculate Ellison's narrative in a perspective that opens up room for discussing who or what systems are responsible for the biased foundations of AI, and what kind of repercussions are we bound to experience of the same, if we do not act now and make them informed of diverse, differentiating, and differently situated communities, their lives, and their viewpoints.

The oppression continues but adapts into a new langauge in the world of EMOX.

I also wanted to specifically use a sound based narrative, where I produced most of the spoken noises in the background, and the poetic narrative to explore the tension between silencing of the marginalised and allowing the space for diverse voices to be heard.

For Tina, she can only speak at night, and she will never know that we had the chance to hear her voice. But the transported artefact, which stores the memory of her life and voice, exposes the audience to Tina's narrative, suggesting the impending doom, a lesson, a warning to question the things around us, and question who builds it, why we build it, and how we build it.





Chapter
Three




< Crafting an Experimental Mixed-Media Film >
















To bring this narrative to life, I embarked on creating an experimental film that combines various media forms:

This mixed-media approach aims to blur the lines between the tangible and intangible, offering viewers a nuanced perspective on our intertwined existence with digital spaces.







Live-Action Sequences: Depicting Alice's physical journey as she traverses the digital landscape.



Hand-Drawn Animations: Illustrating the abstract and often surreal nature of online environments.







Screen Recordings: Capturing the experience of scrolling through social media platforms, reflecting the immersive and, at times, overwhelming nature of digital engagement.




My research and work within digital art exploring digital intimacies and internet culture continues as I work on future projects.

If you want to know more, discuss more, please reach out at workxyashika@gmail.com

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