perimortem [in (theoretical) rigor]

The game you are about to play is excerpted from a keynote address of the same name (itself an excerpt of a much larger digital multimodal project) delivered at the 2024 Computers & Writing (C&W) conference. Ten of the 54 fragments read at C&W are available here in a parser-based format, as it was meant to be experienced. As the full game is a work in progress and has not yet been completed or beta-tested, I appreciate your patience with any glitches I missed.

In keeping with the Inventio section of Kairos, the game world contains reflections on my composing process and my uses of parser interactive fiction to enact cultural aesthetics and the experience of collective trauma and chronic pain through craft. These reflections appear as footnotes scattered throughout the game's metadata, descriptive texts, written materials, and endings. Uncovering these reflections requires exploring the environment that surrounds the perimortem autopsy—a thinly veiled analogy for diasporic-disabled composition processes in Eurocentric-ableist economies of academic writing—as well as the vivisected research subject herself. You must also confront composing decisions of your own, placing your writerly actions in dialogue with mine.

To paraphrase Octave Mirbeau (1899/1995): To the writers, the scholars, the professors, to those people who educate, instruct, colonize, and standardize, I dedicate these pages of torture and blood.

May I contaminate you yet.