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3 Introduction 7 Making: 9 Backplaces 19 Talking Documents 31 Wink 39 What do graphic designers do all day. and why do they do it. and. what does "graphic. design" even mean????!!1!? .49 Writing: 51 < ?water bodies> 103 Performing the Bureaucratic. Border(line)s 157 Fair Leads 201 ⊞ 253 Special Issues: 255 Garden Leeszaal 267 Console 273 TTY -->
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< div id = "content" > < h1 id = "backplaces" > Backplaces< / h1 >
< p > Hi.< br / >
I made this play for you. It is a question, for us to hold together.< / p >
< p > Is all intimacy about bodies? What is it about our bodies that makes
intimacy? What happens when our bodies distance intimacy from us? This
small anthology of poems and short stories lives with these
questions—about having a body without intimacy and intimacy without a
body.This project is also a homage to everyone who has come before and
alongside me, sharing their vulnerability and emotions on the Internet.
I called the places where these things happen backplaces. They are
small, tender online rooms where people experiencing societally
uncomfortable pain can find relief, ease, and transcendence.< / p >
< p > I made three backplaces for you to see, click, and feel: Solar
Sibling, Hermit Fantasy, and Good Pie. Each of these is the result of
its own unique performance or project. Some of the stories I will share
carry memories of pain—both physical and emotional. As you sit in the
audience, know I am with you, holding your hand through each scene. If
the performance feels overwhelming at any point, you have my full
permission to step out, take a break, or leave. This is not
choreographed, and I care deeply for you.< / p >
< p > Solar Sibling is an online performance of shared loss and the complex
pain that siblings can sometimes bring. This project uses comments
people left on TikTok poetry. I extracted the emotions from these
comments, mixed them with my own, and crafted them into poems. It is an
ongoing performance, ending only when your own feelings are secretly
whispered to me.< / p >
< p > Hermit Fantasy is a short story about a bot who wants to be a hermit.
Inspired by an email response from a survey I conducted about receiving
emotional support on the Internet, this story explores the contradiction
of being online while wanting to disconnect. It is a web play inviting
you to navigate both of these feelings.< / p >
< p > Cake Intimacies is a performance that took a year to bring together.
It is a small selection of stories people told me and I held to memory
and rewrote here. The stories come from two perfomances I hosted. In the
first, I asked participants to eat cake, sitting facing or away from
each other and sharing their stories about cake and the Internet. The
second perfomance was hosted at the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival,
as part of the Turning of the Internet workshop. For this performance I
predicted participants’
archetypes and received stories from their Internet past in return. Now
the stories are here, each of them a cake with a filling that tells a
story, merging the bodily with the digital and making a mess of it
all.< / p >
< p > I love you and hope you see what I saw in these stories.< / p >
< p > Safe dreams now. I will talk to you soon.< / p >
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