Experiential Comics 01

This course will combine “world-building” and “speculative design” along with an exploration into emergent technologies to create experiential comics — the next-generation of comic book expressions. Students will be tasked with working as a collective to generate an alternative, fictional world which can be expressed through interactive comics mediums.

homework:

Please write a brief summary about an artifact, character, location or event which exists on our class whiteboard.

For this week's assignment, I picked three elements that mentioned in the whiteboard, which are "Being able to record our dreams" "Castle (city) in the sky" and "sky with no sun and cloud".

Several science fiction films and teleplays came to my mind while I was choosing these settings . Including but not limited to Alita/GUNNM, Black Mirror(Season 1, episode 3), The AniMatrix, In Time(2011), The Hunger Games, Minority Report, Akira.

city in the sky (Alita/GUNNM)

memory recording device (black mirror 1-3)

sky with no sun and cloud ( The AniMatrix)

0-1city (The AniMatrix)

life recorder (In Time)

The capital city (The hunger games)

Victim of certain technology (Minority Report)

The prophet (Minority Report)

Super power (Akira)

The throne on the ruins (Akira)

OK here's my story ⬇️

In 2040, people developed the technology of recording dreams.

Initially, this technology was used to analyze the thinking and behavior patterns of people with mental illness in order to treat them more effectively. As the technology has evolved, it has been applied to people with mild mental illness and normal people, with the hope that it can help them better understand themselves, organize their thoughts and prevent serious mental illness.

One day a college dropout who likes to do science researches in his attic invented a new technology that allows dreams not only to be recorded, but also to be shared. In other words, people can enter someone else's mind and dream someone else's dream. This new invention has inspired unprecedented creativity, with the emergence of thousands of dream-themed social platforms, where people swap stories about their dreams, experience "things one can never dream of."

Everything seems to be moving in the right direction, but someone found commercial interests in dream tech filed. They collect good dreams, and sell them to the rich.The old man can stay in the dream and be a young teenager forever, loners can snuggle in a movie star arms eating popcorn and watch Netflix, Lost loved ones can be returned to their families in the most authentic and beautiful way. With enough money, dreams can be good enough.

In 2050, M Company-- a company about dreams and dream technology, was established. The business system about dreams has been perfected. All high-quality dreams are taken away as soon as they are created. The company has even set up a department to train dream makers in order to make high-quality dreams continuously.

However, dreams in this world are conservative, they can not be gratuitously deleted, when someone receives the good dream, someone must bear the nightmare. As a result, the company also set up a special nightmare digestion department, most of the people in this department are from the poor class. After the undertaking a nightmare, they get paid, or exchanged for food and medical/psychological treatment.

In 2060, the conflict between good dreams and bad dreams is almost irreconcilable. A good dream is worth millions while the paid of bearing a nightmare is less than three dollars. In the expensive dreams people can experience unparalleled vitality, creativity and imagination. But for poor people, they can only remain in the horrors and torments of nightmares. Some of them even give up sleeping.

In 2068, the rich built a city in the sky, intended to create an Eden that is perfect both in reality and in dreams, while the people left on earth become the slaves of nightmares, coexisting with the horror of virtual and reality.

(I also drew a little about characters :D)