Burning Chrome

“Burning Chrome“ is a project based on the short story by William Gibson of the same title and the expanded world of his Sprawl Trilogy. This project is part of the DAAD Art Project 2021, an annual exhibition featuring the work of recipients of the arts and design scholarships of the DAAD in Germany. For this project I am working together with two fellow scholarship recipients, Lena Hetzel (Choreography at Goldsmiths) and Linh Le (Architecture at Central Saint Martins) to create a performative, interactive website experience of the space Gibson lays out in his novels. It explores Gibson´s notion of cyberspace as a “shared hallucination”, while also drawing on the actual history of computers and computer networks around such topics as change of consciousness, the fragmentation of the individual and of media as an extension of individuality, behavior and memory. Specifically on the design, while the UI/UX of the website and its visual assets are based on the fictional corporations, chemical compounds and physical spaces of the novels, they are very much rooted in the intellectual framework of designers and artists from the 60s. People like Anton Stanowksi or the library at Xerox Parc become enmeshed within Gibson´s world and its visual language, resulting in an experience of cyberspaces that is at times ambivalent and ominous, and allows their user to revisit them in our contemporary networks.