Poetic, immersive artist’s book blending narrative, technology, and resistance across time and space.

Contemporary artist Toni Dove creates media machines that blur the boundaries between performance and installation and fuse film, game, experimental theater and artificial intelligence-based interaction. This extraordinary artist’s book is a love story, a conversation between two characters connecting across time, each pushing back against an encroaching dark age. Hypatia, a Hellenistic astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher assassinated in 415 CE returns 10 years in our future as a furious ghost. As she navigates her new environment, she absorbs what has happened over time and encounters a NASA engineer building a solar array off-world power station.

The book, part of a project that includes an installation and a performance, is a poetic and dream-like experience about resistance and the consequences of the fear of knowledge. Augmented Reality adds a magical third dimension, bringing characters and scenes off the page with sound and image using a phone or tablet.

About The Author

Toni Dove is an instrument builder. She creates human operated machines that tell stories. An early innovator of responsive narrative, she is known for genre mashing stories that use interactivity as metaphor to create visceral experience and examine the implications of technological change. Her disruptive practice, developed over years, has created media machines that blur the boundaries between performance and installation and fuse film, game, experimental theater and artificial intelligence-based interaction. Her work has been presented in the US, Europe and Canada, including the Banff Center for the Arts, The Rotterdam Film festival, The Wexner Center, Redcat, The Kitchen, and ZKM. Dove received the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T. and a lifetime achievement award from I.D.M.A.a. The Ringling Museum, Fla., presented a retrospective of Dove’s interactive work “Embodied Machines”, 2018. Her current project “Sunjammer 6: A Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze” is supported by NYSCA, NEA, The Doris Duke Foundation, residencies with Bell Labs E.A.T., and Pioneer Works and opens to the public Jan. 2026, The Schwarzman Center for the Arts at Yale. Dove is a fellow at C.C.A.M., Yale University.