Welcome, to the garden of Eden Attar, I am Nede Ratta, the gardener genie. I am a narcissistic fragment of Eden's ego, set on a special mission to cultivate this public space. I'm her brand manager... [[Continue|2]]Here's what's growing in the garden: [[Bio|Bio]] (link-reveal: "Resume")[(open-url: "CV.pdf")] [[Cabinet of Curiosities|Cabinet]]**The genie speaks monotonously:** Eden Attar was born on... Oh! She's actually here right now, just ask her to tell you. This narcissistic genie needs a cigarette. Hi! I'm Eden Attar! I am an artist, educator, and organizer who lives and works in Boston. My work explores memories of displacement, acts of resurgence, and dreams of anti-colonial futures. My work has been supported by The Luminary St. Louis, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual arts, Harvard University, and the Boston queer and anarchist communities. I graduated from Washington University in Saint Louis, where I did my master's in musicology. I wrote my thesis on *Sesame Street* and the forms of listening it teaches. While I was in the musicology department I was experimenting with a field of study I call *media ecology,* that is, the study media as an interconnected web of communicating, competing, and symbiotic entities studied in the way that an ecologist would study a section of forest. You can my thesis here (link-reveal: "on github")[(open-url: "https://github.com/Meadowlarke/Thesis")] You can see more of my musicological work in my [[cabinet of curiosities.|Cabinet]] As of Jan 2025, I'm rebuilding this site as I've moved from more text-based to more visually based art over the past couple of years. I'll have a porfolio up here soon. If you're looking for the smolnet, well here you go: (link-reveal: "St. Louis smolnet.")[(open-url: "http://stlsmol.net")] [[Starship to the land of Yet|Yet]] [[A real life Tin Pan alley pan full of bananas and automotive parts|TPA]] [[My house|House]]*Yet* is an explorable archive and text based adventure that I made for a class session that I taught when TAing at WASHU. It contains resources pertaining to Janelle Monáe and Sun Ra. "Yet" is a reference to the song "The Power of Yet" which Monáe performed on *Sesame Street,* which I find to be a powerful statement of the ethos of Afrofuturism. (link-reveal: "https://meadowlarke.github.io/Yet/")[(open-url: "https://meadowlarke.github.io/Yet/")]When I first arrived at the program at WASHU I was really frustrated that musicology papers didn't have embedded audio, so I started writing my musicology papers as html webpages. (link-reveal: "Get Out and Get Under: the perennial story of man and machine")[(open-url: "GetUnder.html")] (link-reveal: "Mocking and Mimicry in a Banana-Themed Tin Pan Alley Exchange: a song about a song")[(open-url: "Bananas.html")]Some time during the pandemic, living alone in a new town, I started missing the (link: "domesticity ")[(link: "*queer* domesticity ")[*queer* domesticity---if you need an example of this, watch the chlidren's animated television program *The Owl House*, which is one of the [[most important stories ever told|MIS]]---]]that I had in Chicago and decided that I never wanted to live alone again. I started sketching various dream houses that I could build so that my friends could come live with me. While I was making these sketches I realized that architectural projections are almost entirely visual, though we experience architecture narratively as well as sensorily---that is, we enter a building for a reason, choose a linear path through it, and then leave. This means that our experience has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This got me thinking about making text-based architectural projections that are only narrative and completely non-visual. I started building a house in a MUSH, a multi-user text based world that had its heyday in the 80s, but online MUSH communities are still going strong. It still has a long way to go before its done, but feel free to visit the *House of Attar.* You will need a MUSH client, I like tinyfugue. My address is: 18.225.33.176 4201It's common practice to rate media like movies on a scale of 1-5, 3 being average. This is a relative, statistical rating based on a normal curve, much like IQ. This makes sense if you are rating a bunch of movies, say, writing for the LA Times. However, I don't think this is a very good metric for normal people, and especially not for me. I prefer an absolute, descriptive, rating system: I didn't finish it I watched to get it over with I enjoyed it I loved it I canonize it as one of the best or most important stories ever told Since there is no statistical scale to maintain, canonizing many works does not diminish the status of other canonized works. This metric comes from a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity.