A metamodernist  narrative-driven work, evolving, alas, in tandem with the SARS-CoV-2, nurtured by fortuitous melancholy, afforded by the consequential quarantine, and frighteningly open-ended (just like a pandemic…), the MCIYA project is designed to trigger an insidious frustration purge. It’s about brusque reality shifts: open roads turning from familiar connections between yearning souls into uncanny asphalt corridors towards makeshift isolation rooms. It’s also about an unsettling contemplative virtualization: we’re riding bandwidth freeways as a substitute for concrete highways, ignoring the fact that we’re enjoying a vicarious journey, yet somehow glad that someone else is taking the risk in order to satisfy our mundane desires; we settle for the second-hand experience, which are bound to become more and more violent in order to satisfy our thirst for that “alive feeling”. And, for now, we can blame a quarantine for our doldrums.

The first of the five chapters of the project, the one that I’m presenting for your scrutiny, appropriates the repetition / differentiation nexus in a stereo-chromatic technical loop. It is designed to mimic a form of the “self” plagued by schizoid comfort-zones that stops frightening us after sufficient memories have been archived: a Dantean virtual driver contemplates the journey ahead, under the blasé expectations of a similarly virtual audience. It also sets the stage for clashing bidirectional visions, encompassing three POVs, to be unpacked within the next four segments, which will push the storyline towards alienation and displacement (ch.2), 3^rd wave feminism zeitgeist (ch.3), asocial tunnel-vision (ch.4), and violent confrontation (ch.5). I’ve asked a friend to “subtitle” the project, in order to alleviate a sense of incipient misanthropy and to offers clues; he did so in verse, such as to set a rhythm and to reflect the “soul temperature” of the storyline:

<<Invisible cities await where the highways give way / To ghostly pedestrians, fat dogs and cats gone awry / And rhinestone borders no stork ever crossed either way.

Which highways are lost, that’s for thrones and town halls to decide; / The roads devils build are for angels to tax and deny; / Asphaltic Morganas help turnpikes absorb and divide.

Urbanibalists itch for domes and for shambles in spades / When pangolins moonlight as Rapture pigeons on standby. / Hail, metro-barter! Hail, Dimanche Chefs’ brigades!

Saudade banquets decimate highwaymen in the meantime: / Each chalice is an avatar deliberating on brusque oppidan goodbyes, / Each decimation guests Haruspex divinations in chrome pantomime.

Your prized thoroughfares – thus somber manufacturers of voids / That lead to mushroomed clouds of pearly gates whereby / Reigns schadenfreude karma crowned by selfies and faux-polaroids.

I’ll steer your gluttony to boroughs of bacchanalian repute, / But once your compass gone, stop mourning the death of WIFI! / Inside cenotaphs reception is poor, yet bliss pings en route.

Most freeways dream orthochromatic, so for Daltonic tricks / You ought to squint and wear your monkey suit and tie / And chant “I’m home!” with your gestating moon as testatrix.

Each moon creams a city, while suns broil bridge and gyrations; / Adrift highways nurture, while endowed conurbations belie; / Around the bend I’ll drive you for some diesel-fueled ovations.

Now ask your selves if stereochromatic indications / Of tittering will afford meanings to the crashing “Why?”>> (CSD)

In order to previsualize the mise-en-scène of the project > https://alexandru-crisan.com/projects/mciya-chapter-1-losthoroughfares/

Tags: contemplation, COVID-19, isolation, metamodernism, repetition / differentiation, stereo-chromatic, verse, virtual, work in progress.

MORE ON PROJECT PAGE:

https://alexandru-crisan.com/projects/mciya-chapter-1-losthoroughfares/.

Project initial stage: Lost Highway (LH) > 2014-2017, Project final stage: My Car is Your Avatar (MCIYA) > 2020, Visuals and Concept Design: Alexandru Crisan, Storyline and Verse: C.StDinulescu.