Choose Your anceStory™

Choose Your anceStory™ is a web-based work of interactive fiction, intended as a meditation on the performative nature of ancestral identity.

Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential-realist framework, 1970s TV-play Penda’s Fen, and the artist’s recent encounter with commercial DNA testing, Choose Your anceStory™ is a computational narrative thought-experiment. 

The piece invites its audience to consider how an observer’s apparatus of observation configures their perception of ancestral identity. 

In its fictional world, satirical tech company Choose Your anceStory™ offers you the chance to partake in a novel DNA test, one that allows you to dial up genes from whichever part of the world you identify with most. Afterwards, you get to experience your own interactive ancestral story - your anceStory™. 

Choose Your anceStory™ is technically underpinned by JavaScript, HTML and CSS scripting languages, and was built in Twine 2 using the Sugarcube format. 

The audiovisual aesthetic is designed to encourage its audience to project the contents of their imagination onto the narrative and by doing so consider ancestral identity's entangled performativity.

In our present cultural milieu, awash with firmly-held binary conceptions of identity, the artist hopes this piece encourages its audience to observe carefully how the conceptual boundaries that appear to divide, and define, groups of people emerge.