KSP invites you to explore a novel-of-the-future for real-time bodies:

www.reconstructingmayakovsky.com

Illya Szilak

Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist poet who killed himself in 1930 at the age of 36, Reconstructing Mayakovsky imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and tragedy have been eliminated through technology. Set in a recognizable future, it revisits the past to make sense of the chaotic present. As readers discover Mayakovsky’s biography (prison at age 15, lifelong affair with his editor’s wife, fame, revolution, suicide, posthumous resurrection by Joseph Stalin), they explore their own fears and fantasies about the future. Mayakovsky’s life and poetry enact a conflict between a dominant, fixed narrative (the “utopian” end of history propounded by the Soviet State) and a revolutionary, iconoclastic artistic vision. The novel employs accessible narratives derived from genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel as well as film (for instance, the trope of the meteorite falling to earth, strange things happening, an alien appearance is familiar to anyone who goes to the movies.) At the same time, these narratives are destabilized by juxtaposing highly idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, “cut-and-paste” appropriations, repetitions, and translations. Both the written novel and the website  function as metalogues:  drawing out, challenging, and, partially satisfying the reader/viewer’s desire for a coherent story while offering an anarchic multiplicity of meanings.