This is first and foremost a design project. I have always understood design as a tool for understanding and communication. Cultural Viscera explores how design can make complex relationships visible and give people a way to examine them for themselves.

Cultural Viscera began with questions about what we recognize, what we overlook, and how design can help us understand the difference.

As a survivor of domestic violence both as a child and an adult, I found watching people respond to Wendy in The Shining unsettling. People I knew to be smart, creative, and caring laughed at her suffering or dismissed it. I struggled to reconcile those responses with the qualities I knew in them. Was the comfort of a familiar reading enough to set curiosity and care aside? That disconnect confused me, and I needed to explore what it meant.

I also wanted to understand how the film communicated what I was seeing. I read, watched, and scrubbed through scenes, tracing relationships between images, dialogue, sound, and structure. But moving between written analysis and the film made those connections cumbersome to follow. To add insult to mountains of frustration, I also struggled to communicate them to other people.

Cultural Viscera is the result. Through an interactive study of The Shining, it brings the evidence and its interpretations together, inviting readers to follow connections, compare scenes, and question what they think they know.

The question that started it still matters to me: how does what we recognize on screen connect to what we recognize (or fail to recognize) in our own lives?

The research, analysis, writing, image selection, information architecture, UX, and visual design of Cultural Viscera have been painstakingly developed by me. The site’s code was implemented with OpenAI’s Codex. Stephen King’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film are the source works examined here.