WELCOME TO JOYCESTICK

For two years, I worked as a designer and marketer on Boston College’s trailblazing virtual reality experience: Joycestick, an entirely new way to live in the world of James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses.

An Impossible Idea

With its humble roots as a Boston College digital humanities project under Irish Studies professor Joseph Nugent, Joycestick went on to garner worldwide press coverage from over a hundred media outlets – including the New York Times, the Washing Post, NPR and the Associated Press.

We held exhibits at literary conferences in Boston, Rome, Dublin, Toronto and Singapore and presented our project at Amazon HQ in Seattle and at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

I started out my time as a textual consultant (i.e., someone who read the book… or most of it) and assisted the sound editors. Under the guidance of legendary video editor Liam Weir, I made some promotional videos. I traveled to Rome for the 12th Annual James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference at Roma Tre. The next year, I became a designer, drawing detailed plans for the virtual reality spaces and constructing them with the assistance of the programming team.

Art’s Edge

Joycestick lives the forefront of virtual reality’s promise – a major technological adventure that ultimately hopes to educate and amuse the lifelong students of James Joyce. Of course, there are literally dozens!

By the end of the first two years, Joycestick had raised over $100,000 in funding.

The Team

The Joyestick team was made up of twenty-five students across sixteen different majors and three universities.

Together, we dug into Joyce’s novel, lost a lot of sleep and brought the Dublin of June 16, 1904, to life in a way never before possible.

It went pretty well.

Here’s some of the places we ended up:

Check us out in the Times (featuring my long, flowing hair), the Boston Globe, and the Associated Press.

And check out some promotional videos below.