INTERVIEW: PETRA SZEMÁN, TAKE TWO — MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL

To celebrate the release of VRAL Season One, we are sharing a sneak preview of Gemma Fantacci’s new interview with Petra Szemán about her monumental project Monomyth: gaiden

In 2020, we spoke to Petra Széman about Monomyth: gaiden / Return (2019), the third installment of the epic series Monomyth: gaiden (2018-2020). Back then, she was working on the final chapter, Master of the Two Worlds, which marks the end of the journey for her digital persona, i.e., Yourself, across multiple planes of reality of the contemporary media landscape.

One year later, we reconnected with Petra in order to discuss the trajectory of Monomyth: gaiden in lieu of its latest developments. In this interview, which expands our previous discussion, Széman describes her relationship with her alter ego, the difficulty of wrapping the fragments of a multiple shared reality in a single place, and the inspiration behind an all encompassing project situated at the intersection of the epic poem and anime. Széman has created an online archive hosting the complete Monomyth: gaiden series, which also functions as a repository featuring supplemental resources, including a short visual novel, a dress up video game, a few essays and book excerpts.

Gemma Fantacci: At the beginning of Monomyth: gaiden/ Master of the two worlds, we see a beautiful image: Yourself holds an asterisk on the palm of her hand, a meeting point of multiple reality planes. Her Skyrim avatar, her 2D animation walking around the game environment, photos of Japan and a pixel art/arcade exemplify the complexity and variety of the media landscape that Yourself is navigating. I was thinking about the asterisk and its different meanings: in its typographic use, it indicates a moment of suspension but also operates as a bridge, a portal: it links to a footnote; in science, it is used as a multiplication symbol and, in computer science, it stands for a variable. It suggests different stages of being: momentary suspension and deviation from the main storyline, the multiplication of elements, and data variability. However, when her hand tries to grasp this multiplicity, the asterisk breaks down into thousands pieces, alluding to the difficulty of addressing the concept of identity and reality in a univocal way. Perhaps it is necessary to speak of identities in the plural, pointing to the various layers of reality simultaneously connected. What can you tell us about this particular scene? What role does the asterisk play both as a shape and a concept in the series?

Petra Széman: The star shape is something that I chose without any specific intentions at first. I just wanted to create a 3D shape from several screens, and the simple asterisk was an easy one to start with. My intention was to do some tests with that and then move onto building something more complex, but I found myself reaching back to the original star, and its significance became clearer with time. Until now, I hadn’t considered how the star relates to the concept of gaiden as a detour from the main line of narrative. The most important part of the star is the middle area, where all of its planes intersect. That space where everything overlaps momentarily isn’t visible, but it’s a space that contains all of the realms that build it up, and it is this elusive experience of “wholeness” or a conclusive reality that I’m trying to pinpoint in my work. At the moment, I don’t think this is comprehensible in a straightforward way, and what I’m chasing after in the videos is grasping the instability of the viewing position necessary for understanding that precise point of intersection. If I had to reduce my practice to a singular goal.

The hand reaches out and tries to hold this multiplicity, but this interaction fractures it to a thousand pieces. I’ve always been fascinated with those scenes in films when the glass breaks and you get a slow-motion view of the shards flying everywhere. In Evan Calder Willams’s Shard Cinema, he spins the whole book around this moment, using it to visualize the set of relationships between screens, perception, time, and cinema. A heightened sense of multiplicity and fragmentation.

Gemma Fantacci: “What does your avatar see as the real?”: How do you think Yourself would answer this question? This makes me think about how we tend to feel that it is our physical self pulling the strings of all our digital identities, a puppeteer directing a set of characters on a stage, when actually not a single self is more relevant than the others or holds a higher truth about our identity. As in real life, our online presence is scattered into several characters, all performing. Each role we interpret is an iteration of ourselves, and it is only the sum of them that can perhaps give us a vision of who we are. What’s your take?

Petra Széman: Turning back to the star shape, it’s at the intersection of these characters that you can pinpoint a cohesive idea of a self that envelops all of its perspectives, though I’m not really sure if you’d necessarily be able to create a shape that has a point where all of its building layers meet. The star shape is elusive. I think it’s only in specific locations that allow for the various worlds to align in that way. To attempt to map out a “true self” (using ‘true’ for lack of a better word - maybe objective? cohesive? holistic?) I’m not sure where one would have to start from. Perhaps the shapes that we can build out of these non-localized selves will always have some intermedial space between some of its layers, unable to reach into that space of certainty. This is what I think at the moment anyway, and what I can comprehend may change with time.

Something that I think about often is the places of disparity between Yourself and me, particularly when it comes to national heritage. In Japan I’m obviously white, and in the United Kingdom I’m an Eastern European immigrant. However, in terms of memories and personal history, Yourself has only ever been to Japan as far as real places are concerned, and the closest she’s been to Eastern Europe is Skyrim, which in my head basically equals the mountains and forests of the Carpathian/Pannonian Basin. So, where does my sense of ethnicity and national heritage fit within her worldview? I’m not sure. I’ve been working on some scripts where we work this out for the past few years or so.

Gemma Fantacci: While Yourself contemplates the landscape through the window of a train, your narrating voice says, “when the world outside is too oppressive to make sense of, I hold up my phone camera and force the components inside a frame”. During the pandemic, we have literally lived inside a frame. Our relationship to the screen has undoubtedly changed. On one hand, they have a protective value, while on the other they are a gateway to moments of shared conviviality. The screen has gone from being a point of interaction between different levels of reality to becoming a sort of Russian doll, with multiple layers of meaning. After the first global lockdown, how do you perceive the role of the screen in its double function of protection and access?

Petra Széman: I think the protection that the screen offers can also be a form of access: what really limits our range of motion and contact with the outside world isn’t the screen itself, but covid. The screens offer access to a shared social reality that otherwise would be entirely off-limits in this context. The idea of imposing a duality on the role of the screen doesn’t appeal to me because it echoes the real vs not-real dichotomy, whereas, for me, the value of the screens lie in the medial space that they offer and the transformative forces that they enact within the user-screen spectrum. If I think of the screens as this elusive midway realm instead of one end of a binary (screen vs. not-screen) spectrum. The pandemic has provided a heightened sense of our relationship to these screens, generally speaking, and forced many things inside this disjointed and inconclusive space, for better or worse. In my head, I think of that as an expansion of the screen-based reality, rather than its evolution... I’m not sure if I necessarily believe that anything fundamentally changed within the screens, but rather it’s horizontal movement that has occurred over the past year.

A personal anecdote. Because of the pandemic, I haven’t seen my partner for over a year now as we are in a long-distance relationship and traveling is impossible. We’ve gotten quite used to having the screen as a mediator in our relationship at this point, but the first time we got to play Animal Crossing together on the Nintendo Switch, I remember a distinct sense of bodily closeness as we ran around together with our little avatars, picking fruit and whatnot.

That was a nice moment.