Seeing

You can try out the prototype, but please use headphones.
(Apologies, there are some typos in this one! I’ll get to them as soon as life allows.)

Seeing is a blended media experience created for Suboart Magazine’s Unsubmissive Gazes exhibition in 2023. It was exhibited in Barcelona over the Summer of 2023 and won Runner Up for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature at ELO (Un)linked 2024, the Electronic Literature Organization conference.

Here’s what the jury had to say about the piece:

Seeing is a multicursal tale that seeks to up-end the dominance of the masculine gaze by helping the reader experience gendered perception. The reversal is accomplished through both gendered characters and textual mode rather than visual, thoroughly feminizing the perspective. It is a work deeply concerned with embodiment, charting the sociocultural boundaries where bodies become flesh become meat.

A viscerally sensual description of a woman preparing food shifts and warps across multiple playthroughs: does your eye linger on her curves? On the lurid red of meat? On the way she moves across the room? We loved the tight scope of this piece; it holds a single moment up to the light and carefully examines each emotionally-taut facet, never quite letting the reader off the hook. A work of this nature could very easily have become overly puritanical or judgemental, but Machado avoids this trap with ease. What has been delivered is a subtle, moving, at times uneasy exploration of connection, consumption, and all things inbetween.