This thesis is the seed of an ongoing, webbed, digital exploration into how realities are constructed by and within new media.

In a collection of longer essays, speculative prose inquiries, and text-based games, CHIMAERA.SITE examines cultural objects (primarily horror films, online creepypastas, and alternate reality games [ARGs]) through lenses of media studies and affect theory concepts, including transmedia storytelling, the eerie, hauntology, and the virtual.

CHIMAERA.SITE asks, what within our bodies and within the structures of our society drives us to graft constructed realities over one another? What are the differences in the impacts of these realities, when this grafting is done by: a decentralized online collective seeking to world build together, vs. a marketing firm working to get film views, vs. an individual with oppressive motives?

Hyperlinks throughout the project invite the user to wander deeper into the web of the site itself, as well as out into the wider internet. The written works are supported by a lexicon, annotated bibliography, and various navigational tools.

CHIMAERA.SITE does not seek to arrive at a singular conclusion about these constructions or what the draw is of building and layering realities in these ways. Rather, through the acts of disentangling and weaving, it seeks to hold a more complex picture of what it is that drives individuals to engage with this type of world building.