Oh my God, I just realized that 'the archive' is an evolution of the story I've been telling myself for 20 years? Let me go into meticulous detail when I should be writing my thesis paper:

I've been obsessed with objects as portals since I was a kid - very exciting that this research project has given me the language to talk about them as diagetic narrative objects. Diagetic implies that it's within fiction. But I've been obsessed with it as a metaphysical concept. An object that becomes a pivot that can move things between worlds. I like possible worlds theory because it lets me think about portals in a way that moves it away from the occult or sci-fi. (Even though in my head it is both, more on this later.)

Myst is definitely a big influence - I was so obsessed with those linking books and I tried to write my own with pencil crayons and maps. At one point my dad found software that allowed him to create Myst out of photographs that he took of our house, a slideshow of that allowed us to navigate our house through a hot spots in the photos. The little game he made ended with a random book he laid out in the chair. It was incredibly magical to see my own house suddenly in the game that I loved! That is a kind of portal.

In my twenties, just out of university, I had insomnia that gave me very vivid dreams when I did sleep. I had a dream that I became a portal. My body would pull through small objects from some other place - often these objects were copies of things that were already in the room with me, but in other places they were very different. I could kind of get a map of the landscape of the other dimension based on the objects that came through and hit me.

I ended up working with some sort of government agency that was doing experiments on my to figure out how it worked, as I was desperate to make it stop - like it's very complicated and dangerous to live with random stuff being flung at you all the time. At the time, in real life and in the dream, I worked as a dishwasher at a cooking school, so many of the things that were flung at me were literal kitchen knives. This dream likely began with knives, a significant portion of my life at the time was spent being careful with knives.

In the dream it eventually became obvious ( in that dream logic way ) that there was someone on the other side that had discovered my annoying ability, and was doing also doing experiments trying to see how they could get through themselves.

A few years ago I went through a period of starting a lot of short prose stories and running out of time to finish them - I write comics and video games and poems, but for some reason straightforward prose projects spiral out of control for me and I haven't published anything yet. I remember this dream about being a portal so vividly, and one of the stories I started was this.

An embarrassing proportion of my fiction work is about portals in one way or another, so it's not so shocking that my Master's thesis ended up being about portals as well. But I do wonder if the story seed of an intelligence on the other side finding portal technology and try to use it to get through to us started in this dream.

Definitely part of my interest in other worlds comes from Christianity, that there is a layer of mystic mathematics layered over everything that drops in sometimes to taunt people, asking them to kill their kids or impregnate them. Or of course, you know, heaven and hell. Where are they if up is space and down is the mantle of the earth? Up and down must not exist in x y z, I just looked it up, as a species we've decided the forth dimension is w. So that's fun to know. When I was growing up my household was probably equally enthusiastic about science as it was with Christianity, and I hyperfocused on both pretty hard intermittently. There were a lot of interesting things to think about but one thing I got stuck on is where these other realms ARE. I also went through a hardcore Greek mythology phase later. And Narnia and Xanth. I was always trying to place two places on-top of each other. You can't litter my childhood with portals and bring me up in a culture that believes that miracles and magic exists and not expect me to end up some kind of thought-experiment portal truther.