A Butterfly

A short experimental interactive poem by Nathalie "alienmelon" Lawhead, blending psychological horror and butterfly flight/walking sim. Part of the new Blue Suburbia project (a reconstruction of the web-based work created with her mother Milena between 1999 and 2005), it continues the artist's fascination with '90s internet aesthetics, computer graphics and net art. Lawhead is best known for Everything is going to be OK (now in MoMA's permanent collection) and Tetrageddon Games. Unlike their humour and playfulness, A Butterfly is almost entirely pain. It becomes more powerful after Everything is going to Be OK and BlueSuburbia, alongside the blog entry "Abusing you was by the book", which makes its abstract themes more legible. The experience alternates between a 3D alien desert around a ruined lighthouse and 2D pieces built with Decker, Bitsy and Pocket Platformer. Flying freely among colossal stone giants in eternal agony and collecting ghostly butterflies reveal fragments of an interactive poem, narrated by a static-laced, sputtering voice, while browser-like games advance the days trapped in this limbo, growing increasingly desperate and focused on transformation and surrender. Contrasting scales, formats and generations of digital aesthetics combine into something organic and almost analog. As an arthouse piece, it offers little playability, but flight makes exploration itself the content, creating monumental dreamspaces suspended between the inert void and looming deliverance. Visually glitchy and dreamlike, A Butterfly combines dreamcore, acid-infused surrealism and abstract horror with abrasive, noisy soundscapes and clashing textures, contrasting with the mournful, sour poetry. Its atmosphere recalls Yume Nikki (for the coexistence of beauty, disturbance and the inexplicable), 0⁰N 0⁰W, and fiction.colors. The game is a meditation on grief, death, growth, decay, trauma, loss of self and letting go. Its open narrative and unresolved ending reinforce how overcoming a crisis rarely feels complete. It ultimately becomes a poem about transformation, acceptance and bittersweet surrender. 6/10