CTCS 505 Final Project

“Language has its reasons,” Chris Marker states in Coreennes. The sentence struck me while reading the transcript of the photo essay published in 1959. The book chronicles Marker’s trip to North Korea with other French artists and scholars through the first and last French-North Korean co-production company, Moranbong (Moranbong was an underground theater during the Korean War). The English transcript of Coreennes is available online, but the photographs are not. While I was reading the website, I began to think of the relationship between language and photograph and decided to build a Twine project that explores a lack of agency through providing the words from the book without visuals.

Marker’s Coreennes is not a chronologically or geographically organized travelogue. He jumps from descriptions of his photographs to musings about the smile of Eve and Greek statues. I view the project, “Moranbong Adventures,” as a linguistic map of a country that is now audiovisually inaccessible. North Korea is a constant presence in contemporary news cycles, but not many images circulate. I wanted to mirror such condition by building a game just with the sentences from Coreennes. “Moranbong Adventures” is bilingual, as I have transcribed the book in Korean for this project. To play a bit with agency, I decided to randomly switch from one language to another as the game goes on. The game gives the player some agency in organizing the essay, going back and forth freely. The ideas are connected through word associations, at times adjacent and at other times contrapuntal. Thus, the player is able to experience some sense of linguistic defamiliarization.

I inserted some clips and images that are related to some of the passages, but they are not from the book itself. The game ends with “(letter to the cat G.),” which is the final part of the book. Each sentence alternates in language, and the final cube is a coda, written in 1997, in French language. I wanted to make a final statement on agency by concluding the game with a language that I, the game designer, don’t understand.