“All Your Time Tossed Selves” by Porpentine

Porpentine’s All Your Time Tossed Selves feels part interactive survey and also some kind of inward experience. The story opens with what looks like a questionnaire,  you’re prompted to make choices and respond to strange, poetic questions that seem to measure emotions, time, or maybe even parts of yourself.   All of this done on pull downs like you are answering a survey.  But it’s very unlike a real survey, you can’t just skip around or check boxes without reading carefully. Each question leads somewhere else, and the meaning only starts to unfold if you slow down and take in all the words. It’s like the piece demands your attention and your careful reading, it wants you to feel the rhythm of its sentences and the subtle unease of its tone.

Even  though it feels disjointed at first, everything begins to weave together the more you read. The repetition, the structure, the instructions, the sentances that you have to read even to pick the middle of the thought, these all  build a sense of being analyzed or maybe being lost in your own data, I liked that tension. And then, at the end, the graphs appear, I’m a marketing person by nature and I love a graph – its  colorful, almost like a reward (slightly competitive) or a summary of your emotional journey. They make you wonder if the piece has been keeping track of you all along.

This story is a mirror, reflecting how scattered and multifaceted our “selves” can be, especially in digital spaces. That we’re along for the ride and it may not even reflect our true selves. 

Experiencing “Hannah Feels” by Gavin Inglis

Exploring Hannah Feels by Gavin Inglis was an interesting but somewhat confusing experience. While the timing to this particular story was on point – my prior week was BAD. A reminder of mental health in our lives and how we make choices was a perfect place to land after this bad week.

The piece presents itself like an interactive story where your choices shape what happens to Hannah, the main character. It’s meant to pull you into her world and make you think carefully about how small decisions can affect someone’s emotions and wellbeing. However, I found it a little tricky to follow at times. Some of the prompts weren’t entirely clear, and it was hard to tell which choices would move the story forward or change the outcome in a meaningful way.