On Friday, April 4, the Center for Ethics and Public Engagement (CEPE) hosted “404: Not Found In Area X,” an art exhibit and gallery inspired by the ethos of the works of surrealist writer Jeff VanderMeer. Located in the CEPE office in the Olin Building, students came together to share their projects in traditional and visual art, written word and dance; all bearing the hallmarks of VanderMeer’s writings.

Jeff VanderMeer is an author who is considered one of the forefathers of the “New Weird” genre of literature, a style that borrows heavily from horror and speculative fiction and spotlights the strangest crevices of a novelist’s mind. As VanderMeer himself described it in his aptly titled book “The New Weird,” the genre is “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models.” His “Southern Reach” series launched VanderMeer into the literary mainstream, and it is the world building of these books that students used as inspiration for their artwork in this gallery.

What this means in practice is a very strange and otherworldly aesthetic, where overgrowth shrouds strange creatures and weird occurrences in mystery. To emulate this otherworldly atmosphere for the gallery set up in the CEPE office, the lights were dimmed to allow projectors to flicker their animations across the walls, the bookcases were overtaken by vine decorations and droning music played in the background. In other words, it was the perfect place to have a conversation with Associate Professor of English Andy Hageman, the man behind the exhibition.

Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Question: Can you introduce yourself, for people who might not know you?

Answer: I’m Andy Hageman, professor of English and director of the Center for Ethics and Public Engagement. This was done through the CEPE, and our task is to do different programs and events that get students to take classroom ideas and apply them in different non-curriculum ways.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about Area X and this whole aesthetic? Personally, I see a lot of alien inspiration here.

A: Within VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” series, there’s a place called Area X, set in Florida, where something has happened. You’re right to see alien capacities; it seems like a place that may have been colonized by aliens. So anything that enters that area, whether it’s human or not, is getting transformed and mixed with other stuff, so that’s a lot of where the aesthetic is coming from. If you read the books, [Area X] gives off a very unsettling, uncanny, kind of creepy vibe. It’s a really interesting speculative fiction-based way to think about climate change.

Q: How did this project come together?

A: All we did in the CEPE was put out the call. We circulated that we were looking for students who wanted to do something really creative and gave them the description of the gallery and aesthetic that we were going for. We wanted to get into [VanderMeer’s] ecological aesthetic, that whole vibe of just strange, unusual and nonhuman focus. Then, people simply reached out with writings and art, asking if their projects were fits, for instance, the dance group said that they thought their protozoan show would really work with 404. Some of the work came from classes they had and some of it was produced originally for this.

Q: What do you think of how the project turned out?

A: The main thing, I would just say, is that I’m so impressed with what students made. The two animations we got, one digital and one hand-drawn stop-motion, were really neat. Also, the felt rabbit; the embroidery on there was painstaking and took the student a long time to do. That’s a student who actually read this book in her first year at Luther, it’s sort of been haunting her since then. I feel that we see a lot of different skills, we see Luther students bring together what they’re passionate about and what they’ve studied that they’re intrigued by.

This exhibit acted as a precursor to Jeff VanderMeer’s visit to Luther on April 22 and 23, serving as an opportunity for students to immerse themselves in the world of his writings before hearing from the author himself.