In L00btopia_Chapter One, we meet L00bi. She is a /luckylucky/ gurl, navigating the neo-digital-schizo-chaos of our NOW — sparked and reinforced by contradictory narratives, both offline and online.

Her childhood—feral, in the South African wilderness—was interrupted by a brutal robbery when she was 11. Her family moved to The City the next morning, never to return. Utopia expired, and reality caught up. Since then, she has been in a chaotic limbo, achingly seeking a feeling of home. She tangentially ‘levels up,’ endlessly escaping her circumstances—she runs from city to city, from lover to lover, to the club, to nature, to her computer... SHE IS SO HAPPY UNTIL SHE STAYS STILL. There is so much gooey goodness, sparkles, friends, and fun.

Avatars and digital effigies serve as conduits for real-life venting and journaling. The chaos is within her, and it compounds alongside the exponential growth of narratives, spaces, names, online personas, and real-life personas. Childhood aside, we are all L00bi, we are all seeking a shape. Our splintered, technologically-mediated existences clash with our hypothetically ‘linear’ analogue selves. It’s difficult to imagine a shape when the shape in question relies on its own shape to exist.

L00btopia is a shapeless shape that contains within it (and within it, and within it... as an infinite zoom) the narcissism embedded in her experience of self-creation through self-curation online. She exists projected in the eyes of others, in the green eye of her computer camera, and reflected as a selfie on a screen. There’s a deliciously prickly validation in being seen. And then we must level up—again. Disappear! Invisibility! HikingClubbingDONOTDISTURB. Offline and non-existent.

This film is the birth of a larger world—𝕃𝕠𝕠𝕓𝕥𝕠𝕡𝕚𝕒: a false utopia. We meet the world here through the shapeless ramblings of L00bi’s immediate experience, but the world itself, L00btopia, is a more deliberately constructed creation and curation, and is open to all.

Step back. See the embedded code, the rules of spaces. Why do we act as we do? Everything is made of protocols. I want my protocols to be #silly and #fun. Everything functions in Loobtopia. Until it breaks. Flatline and reboot. Sense is contextual, and context is another narrative. This is the loop of the NOW. Loobtopia is the illusion of escape. Reeeelllaxxxxx, the game is always already over.

B3GIN. Y0|_| //IN.