Beginning to End - Dark Factory: Creative Collaborator, AV/VR Design of Dark Park, Charlie Athanas
Dark Factory is Kathe Koja’s wholly original “immersive” novel that combines her award-winning writing and her skill directing immersive events, to create a story that unfolds on the page, online, and in the reader's creative mind.
A near-future dance club, Dark Factory is three floors of DJs, drinks, and customizable reality, everything you see and hear and feel. Ari Regon is the club’s wild card floor manager and Max Caspar is a stubborn DIY artist, both chasing their own vision of true reality. Rogue journalist Marfa Carpenter is there to write it all down. Then a rooftop rave sets in motion a fathomless energy that may drive Ari and Max to the edge of the ultimate experience.
Meerkat Press released Dark Factory on May 22, and will follow up with Dark Park, in 2023. For our next Beginning to End*, Spine follows the project through author, agent, publicity, and design.
*And since the project hasn’t actually “ended” (thus the asterisk) we’ll finish with a creative collaborator bringing a version of Dark Park to virtual reality in 2023.
My creative collaboration on the project started with someone I had never met (but not a stranger) appearing in my Twitter DMs with a question. “Hi Charlie! If you ever want to chat about AR/VR, I would love to hear your stories/perspectives.” Since it was Kathe Koja, whose many books lined my bookshelves, I was surprised, intrigued, and more than willing to talk with her about Augmented and Virtual Reality. She was working on Dark Factory, an “immersive novel” which involved a nightclub featuring futuristic technology that allowed the high-end guests to play around with reality. Kathe was interested in what was currently feasible in reality-shifting technology and what was coming down the pipeline.
I have a career motto that has served me well—do cool things with cool people—and this was a prime case. Kathe and I begin discussing AR/VR. She spoke to contacts I provided that knew much more than me. We looked into famous nightclubs around the world, the current music/dance scene, what was happening in the social worlds of VR, and how was AR going to affect club life. During this time, I produced some artwork based on Kathe’s work (a clay sculpture for The Cipher and a horned mask for Dark Factory) and showed my process while making them, which led to more interesting discussions about the creation of art.
It became clear that there needed to be an actual Virtual Reality version of Dark Factory’s themes on creation. I began to put together ideas with Kathe and fleshed out sketches of concepts that might be possible with today’s technology.
We looked at various platforms like VRChat and Engage, and immersive linear formats like Pandora X and The Tempest. We were trying to decide what would best tell the story and provide the interactive experience Kathe wanted for her readers. Being able to read an early version of Dark Factory helped as ideas took shape. What solidified our direction was experiencing the Dark Factory book launch where the environment, the DJ, the music, and the atmosphere gave a true sense of what Dark Park should feel like. More sketches and research. This point in the process was taking sketches into a firm reality.
I almost always build scale models out of foam core of environments I am designing, be they sets for play or films, or actual nightclubs and restaurants. This allows me to light, photograph, and move around a space to make enhancements and find new ideas that I can’t find in a static sketch. Once I am confident of the model, I move onto building it digitally.
In this case, I’ll first build Dark Park using Blender and other 3D environment tools that will allow for more sophisticated lighting and materials and let us move around in the space itself. It also enhances the collaboration with Kathe on the direction and feel of Dark Park and lets us look at how we can make it immersive, interactive, and fun for the person exploring it. It will contain several environments so there will be a variety of things to discover and experience. Eventually, when we are satisfied with the design, it will be built into a social VR setting like VRChat and will allow people from all over the world to see it and interact with it themselves.
See more of Charlie’s work here.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.