Test/Break an evening of prototyping with Columbia DSL

Test/Break is a monthly prototyping series by Columbia DSL. Join us as we delve into an array of projects in different stages of development. Test/Break offers a platform for creatives to explore groundbreaking forms and functions of storytelling. We focus on projects that push the boundaries of narrative possibilities, leveraging emerging tech like AI, AR, VR, and IoT as well as web-pervasive technologies. It's a unique opportunity for virtual creators, fostering collaboration and experimenting with participatory methods of interaction. After each prototyping session, we open the floor for engaging conversations that unveil the secrets of creative practice. Don't miss out on this exciting journey of innovation and storytelling!

We'll be testing/breaking two different projects.

Project #1
Fractured is an interactive speculative memoir that plunges into the depths of psychosis, exploring how a breaking and fragmenting mind loses contact with reality. Reimagining the book as both object and portal, it transforms storytelling into a multisensory, interactive experience beyond the page. Through dynamic, responsive interactions, Fractured unfolds across multiple dimensions, activating its narrative through motion, proximity, and touch. Sensors detect presence, triggering shifts in text, soundscapes, and visual fragments that mirror the disorienting experience of a fractured psyche. Fractured bridges literature, interactive media, and speculative experience, immersing participants in the unstable terrain of a fractured mind. It is both a story and a space—where memory fractures, reality distorts, and the narrative unfolds through the body and senses.

During Test/Break, participants will engage in a community storytelling experience and co-create a narrative from "fragments" that mirror the disorienting experience of a fractured psyche.

Magalis Videaux is an artist, designer, and maker whose work and social practice live at the intersection of experience design and immersive, participatory storytelling. She creates projects and cultivates spaces that harness story, design, and emerging media/technology as tools for critical play and social dreaming. In her artistic practice, Videaux embraces an interconnectivity between emerging technology and traditional knowledge, and generates creative research that explores and investigates new forms of digital storytelling, with a focus on XR driven experiences.

Project #2
The Last Human Haunted House is a multi-sensory, interactive horror installation that fuses physical and digital spaces, plunging audiences into the existential horror of an internet that no longer needs humans. Inspired by the Dead Internet Theory, this haunted house is not just a spectacle—it is a conceptual art piece about the death of organic reality, AI hallucination, and the erasure of human agency. Participants will navigate a liminal space where the boundaries between organic thought and algorithmic control blur, forcing them to question whether they are still in control—or merely ghosts haunting a world that has already forgotten them.

Project team
Lance Weiler, Shar Simpson, Josh Corn and Nick Fortugno