New Work:    The Fog


Compressed and looping screen capture of The Fog: Act 1, 2023




November 3rd 2023 - Ongoing

A digital projects commission for the San José Museum of Art.

The project can be viewed here: https://sjmusart.org/digital-projects/chelsea-thompto

This body of work centers around the politics of knowledge making, data collection, and trans visibility through an exploration of fog as a common subject/trope of horror narratives as well as metaphor used in military strategy. The questions driving this work include: Why has fog been figured as a menace in the popular imagination? Can fog be an aspirational figure for trans embodiment and resistance? What would embodiment styled after fog feel and look like?

The work consists of 3 "acts" exploring our relationship to fog as a society and the potential for fog to serve as a positive role model for trans embodiment. Each act is built as a procedurally generated 3D space using three.js. The work has been designed as a website without ads or tracking and with intentionally open source code. Sustainability and accessibility also informed the design choices for the site.

Source code for the work can be viewed here: https://github.com/cthompto/the-fog-sjma