An Exhortation to Wadoona
An Exhortation to Wadoona was a lengthy and anonymous letter to the editors of the Silkenvault imprint of The Guild Gazette extolling the virtues of a newly constructed language: Wadoona, a language of romance, dreams, and aesthetic expression.
Purpose
The Exhortation was written by its anonymous author as a part of an extended piece of multimedia art - really, an alternate reality game - for the age of RadNet communications. Wadoona is an artlang created as a means of conveying certain emotions and artistic concepts in a soothing, seductive manner; indeed, the language is best spoken in whispers directly into the ears of others. The game was was manifestly designed to seed knowledge of this language in various places - a letter to the editor here, a pirate broadcast here, a series of performance pieces carried out by the author's collaborators on the streets of Silkenvault, and others - in the hopes that its use would spread organically from there.
As participants picked up scraps of the language, they would learn about a longer version of the story told in the Exhortation, with audience interactions including exchanges through mail, RadNet communiques, and further mysterious coded messages in the personal ads of local papers. The ultimate twist was that the lovers from the story had actually managed to fuse their spirits together through Wadoona and, thereby, become strong enough to survive into Manifold Sky setting from a previous cycle, across the spiritual gap between cycles represented by The Curved Time. In essence, the Exhortation all that followed was an artistic reimagining of Rostran Esotericist lore for a Human audience.
Ultimately, the goal of the so-called 'Wadoona experience' was to make people reconsider their own intuitions about the world and the relationships between people within it from an outsider's perspective. The author and his collaborators succeded in this, as Wadoona is now the language of an epicyclist counterculture movement challenging the predominant Voxelian Idealist Movement even long after the alternate reality game ended.
Epicyclism Logo by BCGR_Wurth
Document Structure
Clauses
The Exhortation itself is a short story, told in verse, about the strange, secret language that the protagonists (a pair of lovers) have created to express the depths of their desires to one another. This language helps the couple achieve better spiritual union with one another, but it also proves to be a mystical language capable of opening the way into a place of pure forms and ideas - the 'oneiroscape,' or the 'world of dreams.' Frequent allusions to nocturnal journeys, whether real or in the space between sleeping and wakefulness, run throughout the tale. The tale ends with the lovers beckoning readers of all classes and cultures to to join them in the dream world of their creation, while providing hints - including the first basic rudiments of the Wadoona language - to where those interested in participating in the 'game' could look for the next set of clues.
Comments