Carmi Tronci-Bell | Godhead
North View Gallery
An exhibition immersing viewers in the world of Godhead, an interactive webcomic that proposes an Afrofuturist vision of the United States in the nineteenth century.
- Exhibition Dates: January 6 – February 20, 2025
- Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 9am-5pm, Saturdays by appointment
- Opening reception: Wednesday, January 8 from 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.
- Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 5 from 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Godhead is an ongoing interactive webcomic that Tronci-Bell began in 2017. The narrative centers on a girl genius named Walnut, enslaved in a historical United States where slavery is still legal. The story follows Walnut as she develops an unlikely friendship with a celestial god, the titular Godhead, who lands on earth and begins to interact with inhabitants via a computer monitor. Once Godhead meets Walnut, they start working together to build a flying machine so that Walnut can escape, both the plantation on which she is enslaved and the Earth itself. Through this story, Tronci-Bell seeks to humanize the people who are enslaved in Godhead, inviting readers to relate to them, and reconsider the fairness of many oppressive systems.
Though Godhead is set in the nineteenth century, the webcomic is infused with late 90s/early 2000s Internet aesthetics, drawing on the look of Windows 98 and Windows 7 UI, The Sims, VLC media player and of course, Geocities. Additionally, many of the figures and panels are pixelated and simplified, as if the artist had to work quickly to capture the story as it rushed out. Tronci-Bell is a skilled draftsman, but made aesthetic choices to engage with readers in particular ways. He experiments with navigation tools, letting some pages scroll up and down, some left to right and intermixing dynamic animations that pulse to the beat of music composed by collaborators. Sometimes the reader is invited to play games embedded in the story that glitch and frustrate, while investing them further in the narrative. The relationship between the reader and the webcomic itself is mirrored by Godhead’s interface with Earth, which is controlled by a glitchy operating system whose gravity feels out of whack when too many tabs are open, and Godhead consistently has too many tabs open.
Carmi Tronci-Bell, Godhead staring at a screen, digital drawing, detail from Godhead webcomic, 2017-2024.
Tronci-Bell wrote all of the code for this project and has intentionally designed a format for the epic tale that feels user unfriendly at times. He has explained that this approach is designed to make it slightly uncomfortable or confusing to navigate the story, in part to challenge the ease with which we typically consume online. Tronci-Bell sees Godhead as critical fiction with the potential to expose the dysfunctional and oppressive realities experienced by so many every day. In this sense, Tronci-Bell’s work is aligned with what curator and writer Legacy Russell identifies as artists who employ digital platforms to intentionally glitch systems of oppression and open new possibilities for interaction and new ways of thinking about what it means to be human in our current digital landscape.
Godhead is a fundamentally pro-independent web project that was made as a challenge to the corporatization of the Internet over the past twenty years. In the context of a web whose function it is to sell products (including our attention), Godhead is a form of protest, filling the Internet with functionally useless pages that glitch or exist just for fun. As readers encounter scenes that scroll backwards, read upside down or playfully crash browsers, Godhead asks us to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, the frustration of being unable to fully understand and the joy of experiencing beauty amidst uncertainty.
Carmi Tronci-Bell, Segments from Godhead’s origin story, digital drawings, details from Godhead webcomic, 2017-2024.
About the Artist
Carmi Tronci-Bell is an artist and programmer who has created a variety of webcomix hosted at spicyyeti.com. He is the creator of Spicy Webmasters Discord, designed to encourage young artists to learn how to code and add their own creative voices to the Internet. He has had a solo show at Ori Gallery in Portland, Oregon and in 2023, was an artist in residence at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City.