Cycle 1 Presentation – here4u

For my final project in DEMS, titled here4u, I’m working to tell a non-linear narrative about a long distance platonic relationship between a mother and a son. The story is told mainly through text messages, voicemails, and journal entries and photographs (both physical and digital), unlocked via QR codes scattered throughout the installation. My inspiration comes from an extremely personal place as I have been in this very situation for the past four years of my undergraduate career, and my drive for this project stems from an artistic desire for transparency between creator/performer and the audience. Through this project, I am opening myself up to the audience — using actual voicemails and texts between my mother and I and actual entries from my journal — to tell a story about distance, loneliness, belonging, misinformation, struggle, and coming of age. I am doing all of this in the hopes that my “baring it all” can open a dialogue about connection and relation between myself and the people experiencing this installation, as well as between the visitors to the space.

In the first cycle presentation, I organized two desk spaces diagonal to each other in the Motion Lab, one being the “mother” space and the other being the “son” space. The mother space has various artifacts that would be found on my mom’s desk at home: note pads with hand-written reminders, prayer cards and rosaries from my Baba, and a film photograph from the cottage that my mom and I used to live in. Spread within the artifacts are QR codes that include worried voicemails from my mom about suspicious activity on campus, texts from her to me asking where I’ve been, and links to screen recordings of our longer text conversations.

Across the room stands the son space, a much less organized desk with worn and filled daily planners, books dealing with citizenship theory, journals open to personal entries, and crumpled to-do lists. The QR codes here lead to first-person videos of protests, an online gallery of silhouetted selfies, and voicemails apologizing for taking so long to respond to my mom.

In the creation of this project, I am dredging up a wealth of emotions from my time in Columbus and pinning it to a presentation that I hope won’t feel like a performance. That being said, I realize that in it’s presentational nature, there are certain theatrical elements that need to be considered and addressed. With the first cycle showing, I learned very quickly how individual an experience this is. In order to get the most out of the QR codes — particularly the voicemails — the audience members must wear headphones, which immediately isolates them into their own world and deters connection with other audience members during their experience. In my attempt for creating a feeling of loneliness, I would say this was a success.

I received a wealth of feedback on which aspects of both spaces worked and which didn’t, and agreement on the most powerful aspects of the story-telling being the voicemails and texts was unanimous due to the emotion heard in the voice. At the suggestion of Ashlee Daniels Taylor, I will be working to generally increase the amount of material in the space so that there is more to look through and find in the QR codes. This works towards another one of my goals with the narrative, which is to engender the sense of a story without the need for the audience member to find every single piece of the puzzle, amplifying individual experience within the installation.

For my second cycle, I have been working towards the generation of more material to be found and directing the experience moreso than in my first presentation. Without any sort of guidance using vocal, lighting, or other cues, the first presentation invited viewers to find their own way through the installation which, although was fun for me to watch and hear how different people pieced together the experience for themselves, led to awkward successive QR codes (being too similar or repetitive), a desire for more direction, and an undefined ending to the experience. I will be working with some theatrical lighting to guide the viewers in a more predetermined path through the space.

The emotional feedback that I received after the first presentation has inspired me to push forward with this project’s main intentions and to develop this experience has honestly and authentically as possible. The tears and personal relations shared in our post-presentation discussion proved to me the value in making oneself vulnerable to their audience and I intend to lean into this for the second cycle presentation.