Destination Wedding 2070 is a futuristic netprov in which you roleplay a family member slogging to a far corner of the globe so you can bicker with relatives, troubleshoot catastrophes, and vent in your secret diary. Oh, and of course — so you can celebrate the blissful union of the happy couple!
Destination Wedding 2070 is a dark comedy about wedding planning 50 years from now, and, spoiler alert: climate change is the ultimate wedding crasher! Destination Wedding 2070 aims to make data about climate change more comprehensible. Although climatologists have strong models of the decades to come, they typically share it via graphs and charts. This netprov goes beyond data visualization by bringing the numbers to life in data dramatization as participants experience the effects in a speculative future scenario. The data for this data dramatization netprov has been brought to you by EarthGames and was based on simulations from the CanESM5 model under SSP585, a high emissions scenario that represents substantial increases in fossil fuel use in the coming decades. Wedding guests (invited and uninvited) imagined and narrated the personal and emotional effects of computational climate models on their fictional lives.
About the Artists
Destination Wedding 2070 was played by netprovers, including students at the University of Minnesota - Duluth, University of Southern California, University of Alberta, and Western Connecticut State University.
Samara Hayley Steele, MFA, is a PhD student in Cultural Studies and a Graduate Research Fellow with the ModLab, the Humanities Game Lab at UC Davis. She has been a practitioner, gamerunner, and maker of interactive narrative media since 2002, and is a co-creator of Thermophiles in Love (2016), a five-gender dating game featured in the gallery of the 30th Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). Her most recent project is Sivad, a place-based analog RPG campaign that takes place in a mysterious world connected to Davis through quantum entanglement. Steele is also a Staff Economist with the California Economists Collective, a group working to leverage the University of California’s power towards community wealth building strategies, supporting indigenous communities, democratic workplaces, and ecological harm reduction. Steele is a former foster kid, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University.
Dargan Frierson is an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and the head of the EarthGames group at the University of Washington. Frierson studies how climate change can alter big, climatic features, like storm tracks, tropical rain bands, or deserts. He uses different types of models to investigate these features’ fundamental dynamics. Frierson and his colleagues recently published a video game for smart phones called Climate Quest that follows a narrative arc of collective action: people of various backgrounds come together to help mitigate the worst of the climate crisis. Additionally, Frierson and his colleagues are the creators of Infrared Escape, an arcade-style cellphone game that puts you in the perspective of a beam of infrared light attempting to escape an increasingly carbon-filled atmosphere.
Mark C. Marino (http://markcmarino.com) is a writer and scholar of electronic literature living in Los Angeles where he is a professor (Teaching) of writing at the University of Southern California. He recently taught How to Write and Read Fake News for UnderAcademy College (https://medium.com/the-fake-news-reader/). He also teaches writing at the University of Southern California where he Directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (http://haccslab.com). His recent work includes Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House (http://markcmarino.com/mrsw/), a collection of interactive stories he is writing with his children. His book Critical Code Studies was just published by MIT Press (2020). Mark is the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org).
Rob Wittig plays at the crossroads of literature, graphic design and digital culture. He co-founded the legendary IN.S.OMNIA electronic bulletin board with the Surrealist-style literary and art group Invisible Seattle. From this came a Fulbright grant to study the writing and graphic design of electronic literature with philosopher Jacques Derrida in Paris. Rob’s book based on that work, Invisible Rendezvous, was published Wesleyan University Press. He then embarked on a series of illustrated and designed email and web fictions. Rob has worked in major publishing and graphic design firms in Chicago, leading R&D teams. He is currently developing high-design, collaborative fiction in a form called netprov, networked improv narrative. Rob teaches graphic design and writing at the University of Minnesota Duluth.