Marisa Musing

From tourist paraphernalia to photographic reproductions and artistic re-interpretations, the Villa of Mysteries has amassed an accretion of surfaces and mimicked layers. Disruptive excavation procedures of the early 1900s physically altered the imagery of the walls, and countless perspectives of the figures and their actions have unfolded through gender analysis, psychoanalysis, writing, and art, looking to reveal the mystery of the scene. Notably, the male gaze formalised sexist and objectifying stories for the women depicted on the walls, being described by the likes of Sigmund Freud and August Maiuri as ‘intruigingly psycho-erotic subject matter’, ‘the sensual’ ‘voluptuous bodies’ being ‘perfectly preserved youthful beauties’. A cyberfeminist analysis of the site can provide a new common language to interpret the architecture of the Villa of Mysteries and tell revised stories for these women that moves away from the patriarchal lens of the past.

Using Homi Bhabha’s description of mimicry as a translation of meaning, I developed a taxonomy of four stages to describe the queer cyberfeminist method, inspired by Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra Simulation and archaeologist August Mauiuri's defining of four styles of fresco in Pompeii, Italy.

1. MOCKERY

The first stage of decorations is a mimicry of itself, by imitating the wall. It is not until with closer inspection, the mockery of reality is revealed. Similar to Google’s Deep Dream simulation, the glitches in the imagery veer further away from pure mimicry, but perhaps create greater value than an exact replica of the original.

2. DECEPTION

The second breaches the barrier of the four-cornered room to bring depth beyond with perspectival vistas. Similar to the uncanny valley of digital work, the deception of reality creates more intrigue because of the opportunity it creates for anticipation of a realm we do not fully know. 

3. ILLUSION

The third stage returns to the closed-wall, but establishes a new fictional language for the architectural reliefs that frame the surface, an illusion of reality. The image at this order aims to conceal the fact that it has a referent, or claims to describe a referent that does not actually exist. Perverse memes today have this effect, where a joke is hidden in the fact of having to understand what came before. 

4. HYBRIDISATION

The fourth and final stage is inverted again, opening multiple perspectival vistas that enter into decorative splendour, and involves elements of each previous style but with greater vibrance than before. This hybridisation of mimicry reacts to itself and precedes itself; these images are therefore complex and infinite. The internet is the most radical and perpetual form of the fourth order, a style of fractal pure imagination.

Taking on the queer cyberfeminist methodology I developed a series of studies using AI to understand the site and its frescoes through this new language, working from a site perspective, developing new figurative models, and recontextualising the fresco through detail and architecture.

To fully develop the cyberfem language I wanted to reinvestigate the stories of four prominent women in the site, the Domina, the fleeing woman, the kneeling woman and the bride. Descriptions of each of the characters were collected and labelled to create a taxonomy that was used as the input information for the AI. Given the prompt to write the identity for the character, the AI wrote a series of descriptions, one based on input written by male authors, one based on input by female authors, then using the output from the female author perspective, two more biographies were written with the additional prompt words, ‘cyborg’, and ‘queer’. These compiled descriptions were plugged back into the AI to create a final perspective of the characters as queer cyborg feminists, which then was used to write stories of the buildings they would design, and scripts of their life and environments. Taking these revised descriptions and the methodologies described by the four contemporary women, this elaborate collaboration expanded the perspectives of the women to create new formalised narratives of their architecture and identities. 

The architectural environments are designed based on their revised identities, the language of fresco and AI as each character relates to the different stages. Physical artefacts were also created as an application of the methodology and interpretation of meaning of the Villa of Mysteries that builds on the architecture of the new stories.