Ashley Obscura
Poet, Publisher & Storyteller
Post-Digital Literary Worlds
My research-creation practice treats poetry as an embodied, transmedial technology—one capable of generating new ways of sensing, remembering, and moving through the world. I work across books, sound, digital platforms, VR, and game-based environments, exploring what happens when language is freed from the page and placed inside systems not designed for it: immersive worlds, attention economies, interfaces, and algorithmic environments.
I’m interested in how poetry behaves under pressure—how it flickers, transforms, glitches, or grows more luminous when displaced from familiar containers. This inquiry is rooted in my own questions of diaspora, unbelonging, and the psychic residues of language loss: how a self forms when the mother tongue is interrupted; how interiority survives within infrastructures that flatten it; how tenderness moves through digital and post-digital space.
Across my projects, I build alternative architectures for literary experience—publishing systems that redistribute visibility and access; digital portals and poetic interfaces that resist extractive platform logic; VR and game worlds where feeling, slowness, and care can take precedence over spectacle. My methodology is iterative and collaborative, shaped by speculative design, feminist media theory, and community-based publishing practices.
At the centre of my work is an insistence that poetry is not decoration but infrastructure: a system for attention, relation, and survival. I create forms that make room for interior worlds to expand, recalibrate, and connect—despite, and sometimes through, the technological conditions we inherit.