I wrote The Unbinding of Po Chen for a yet-unnamed arts zine still under development by the wonderful and very talented production designer and film director Yelizaveta Mamajeva. Whenever I re-read Unbinding I'm shocked to discover how distilled and purely it explores the themes I most typically pursue in all my artistic ventures. These are:

• The "virtual" as an aesthetic encoding of cognitive phenomena in general
• The ego death potential in immersive virtual realities
• The immense, often self-destructive desire for exotic qualia
• The effect on love by a personal metaphysics

And other fancies like futurist worldbuilding and techno-wonders.

I write a lot of screenplays, and in pursuit of cinematic translatability I restrain the full capabilities of language to just those that aid with clarity of vision and feeling. With Unbinding I was able to add to this clarity discursions outside of time and space where I take off on exotic flights of mind.

Film is no less capable of such flights, but that medium and craft is multi-disciplinary, often spiritual and intuitive. In film the written word serves the purpose of ingredient or recipe rather than dish. In some ways my films The Irresponsibles and some parts of VoidBraid are imperfect experiments in reaching similar flights of mind to what my short stories can achieve. If you read VoidBraid, the contrast in capabilities between the screen and the page is even more striking.

You can read The Unbinding of Po Chen in full below: