Excerpt from the Dakopeta Project

Abstract

The following Excerpt from the Dakopeta Project is a purely auditory experience for reasons that are further gone into in the project’s Statement of Work on the following pages. What the whole project attempts to achieve, through the usage of fantasy and travel writing tropes, is to create an unreal place that lays over the one we inhabit, a place that shares the geography of this real place, shares names of it, shares languages and customs and histories with reality, but that is also, necessarily, alien. Because of this, the project is, in many ways, about a real place, about Western Washington State and parts of Southern British Columbia, everything North and west of the Columbia River and South and East of the Fraser River, but, while it is a more or less reliable sonic atlas of the places that exist between those rivers and the Pacific Ocean, it is an unreliable sonic guide to the customs, people, animals and stories that do not really exist there. The excerpt which makes up this thesis, attached as a supplementary file, covers two folktales – a story about a woman who falls in love with a ghost and a story about the natural disasters that separate the nation of Dakopeta from the real places that exist within it – the description of a city of South Vancouver, an interview taken from a Nevadan who claims that there is civil unrest in the western states, one song – When the Mountains Speak – descriptions of travel, and a description of the place of telling, of a castle in the barony of Defiance.