An interactive art installation engaging players with the experiences of gay prisoners.
Art Installation, Dialogue Game
2025
Description
The piece is an interactive visual-novel-style game simulating speaking to prisoners with a prison video visitation system. The viewer can click the 0-9 number pad buttons to interact with a character and uncover a narrative.
Research
The dialogue is a retelling of the last years of English playwright Oscar Wilde's life, based on his writings while imprisoned for sodomy. I drew from, The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde (2018) and watched the film, The Happy Prince by Rupert Everett (2018).
Interaction
The physical structure is designed to imitate real-life video visitation systems used to facilitate calls between inmates and their visitors. It uses a number pad for all interactions by the user, giving an analog feel and a sense of the 90’s time period. The pixelated graphics and dialogue box take inspiration from narrative video games which provides cues for the viewer to interpret how to interact with the interface.Process
Tools
Adobe Illustrator for mockupTwine for prototyping the dialogue system
Processing for coding the program
Arduino IDE for running the program
Adobe After Effects for the implemented visuals
Stages
Researched the life of Oscar Wilde, the inspiration for the projectDesigned a mockup in Adobe Illustrator
Created the dialogue player journey in Twine
Constructed an Arduino circuit with the number pad, phone, and screen hardware
Coded the graphics and dialogue system in Processing
Constructed the box and installed the components
Tested and debugged the installation
Reflection
In this project I brought together a hardware and software vision to life and learned about how both components' limitations must be considered at each step of the development process. This was a challenging creative writing exercise that improved my abilities to create narrative and dialogue from real-life material.