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The Fate of the Online Cow 

Media Design & Graphic Design

Produced by Synecdoche Works at Chain Theatre, April 2025. Written by kanishk pandey, directed by Marissa Joyce Stamps

Workshop Production at Brick Aux, August 25th and 26th, 2023. Written  & directed by kanishk pandey
The Fate of the Online Cow is a collaborative theatrical experience developed over four years, first as a small self-produced show between writer / director kanishk pandey and designer Lauren Serafica, and then next as a production with a production company and creative team. The play is about a cow who plays Minecraft and speaks with her stream chat, as her owners Mud and Hue keep watch over her. Our greatest challenge was the technical design of the stream chat, which was written line-by-line in the script.

The 4,000 lines of the chat were programmed using Javascript, which dynamically separated each line from the script into its own chat line and assigned it a random color to distinguish it from the others. The chat was then rendered as videos so we could cue it at pivotal moments when it responds to Cow. The result is a massive projected backdrop of Cow's streaming world: a game of Minecraft and a Chat that gave her the ability to realize her consciousness and her inherent desire for freedom. Another challenge was to treat the Chat as an expressive character with an arc of its own — in the beginning each user seems separate and defined, represented by different randomized colors, but as Cow becomes conscious of her oppression, the chat begins to morph both textually and visually into a unified chorus.

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