Kat Mustatea is a playwright and technologist whose tech-native storytelling stretches theater into the digital age. She has written plays in which people turn into lizards, a woman has a sexual relationship with a swan, and a one-eyed cyclops tries to fit into Manhattan society by getting a second eye surgically implanted in his head.

She is a co-curator of EdgeCut, a live performance series that explores our complex relationship to the digital, and a member of NEW INC, the art and tech incubator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Her TED talk originates a novel thesis about autonomous, algorithmic systems as a form of puppetry. Her plays have been performed in Berlin, Oslo, New York, and Chicago, and a recent short play, Carlett's Just Carlett, was shortlisted for the international Carlo Annoni Prize.

Kat speaks frequently about the intersection of cutting edge technology and art (most recently at SXSW, The Pompidou Center, Ars Electronica). Her writing appears in Majuscule, Forbes, The Week, and Hyperallergic. Cueva Gallery recently detailed her work with synthetic language, and her first poetry manuscript was shortlisted for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize from Waywiser Press.

VOIDOPOLIS is a retelling of Dante's Inferno, informed by the grim experience of wandering through NYC during a pandemic. Instead of Virgil, the narrator's guide is a caustic hobo named Nikita. The text, made only with words that do not contain the letter "E, " is an example of synthetic language, composed in collaboration with a modified AI text generating tool. The images are created by ‘wiping’ humans from stock photography. The narrative unfolds on Instagram over 40-ish posts on Kat Mustatea's feed (@kmustatea), a digital performance meant to culminate in loss. Once the story is complete, it will be deleted forever. VOIDOPOLIS offers a method for practicing the act of forgetting that it was ever made. Its omissions speak to loss of time, of sickened people, and by ultimately disappearing itself, makes a case for the collective amnesia that follows from trauma.

As a result of the computational techniques employed in its making, the work was part of the 2020 Ars Electronica + The Grid: Exposure Festival. True to its hybrid status across literature, technology and social media, it won the 2020 Arts & Letters 'Unclassifiable' Prize for Literature, given to works "that blur, bend, blend, erase, or obliterate genre and other labels." Judge Michael Martone noted:
[VOIDOPOLIS] takes to heart and exploits the reality that a writer today is not simply a "writer" who writes, creating a text, but a media artist not using a 19th century typewriter but an extremely powerful typesetting machine now connected to the internet. I also was attracted to the ephemeral nature of the piece, its temporary-ness. A piece about the virus infects itself with its own digital virus that rewrites then erases the living codes.

The work was featured in Dovetail Magazine, and excerpts were 'exhibited' in August in the form of a week-long Instagram takeover of Codame Art + Tech, an organization based out of San Francisco.

Please visit Kat’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and her website for more information.