Élan Vitale: A Story Of Death

Resident artist Uma Breakdown's Élan Vitale is a short interactive fiction with a gothic sci-fi angle on death, experimental technology, and life at the edge of it all.

By Uma Breakdown
12 Jun 2023

Container Podcast
Container Podcast
Élan Vitale: A Story Of Death
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a silhouette sketch of a bat with anthropomorphic legs and big white eyes, outlined in purple

Play Élan Vitale

A version with reduced animations is available here

A illustration of a gothic silhouette of a castle on a stormy night

Mountain By Uma Breakdown

“In this situation,
you’ve got yourself into a place where you shouldn’t be.”

Uma Breakdown’s atmospheric, wry, gothic science-fiction text adventure Élan Vitale is the result of their residency with Container Magazine.

Illustration of a car crashed off the road into a forest or rocks. A black and white silhouette style.

Car Crash by Uma Breakdown

A broken into flat. A pile of old machinery and energy drinks. A diary pointing to how it got this way. Dare you set foot inside and learn?

The story centres thoughts around the future prospects of dead spaces as a trans* artist, the potential within them for shifts in biology, politics and more, and the intrusion of profit-making technologies.

Inside the flat and its apparatuses the slippery nature of the truth, the potential for uploaded consciousness, and the maintenance of living spaces collide.

Learn more about Uma’s work here

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