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.<br/>
</p>
<p>Hi.<br/>
I made this play for you; it’s a question to keep us alive together. Is all intimacy about bodies? What happens when our bodies distance intimacy from us?
Backplaces is a web-based play. A short anthology of poems and stories about vulnerability, intimacy, and the internet. It explores the internet as a place for holding big feelings and intimacy when it is unbearable. As a homage to those who have been vulnerable with me, I created "backplaces". They are tender online spaces for relief and acknowledgement of societal pain.
Some of these stories may evoke memories of pain. As you sit in the audience, know I am with you. If it feels overwhelming, you can step out, take a break, or leave. This isn't choreographed, and I care for you.
I hope you see what I saw in these stories. Sweet dreams now, and I'll talk to you soon.
<br><br>
love, Ada
<p>I made three backplaces for you to see, click, and feel: Solar
Sibling, Hermit Fantasy, and Cake Intimacies. 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.<br/>
</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="index.png"
<imgsrc="index.png"class="half-image"
alt="This is the Index, the stage of my play. Each felted item is an act." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">This is the Index, the stage of my play.
Each felted item is an act.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p> This is the first act of this play, Solar Sibling. It reimagines user comments from TikTok videos about sibling relationships. To do this, I have taken the feelings behind the comments, found where they met my own, and used our shared words to write poems. Solar Sibling celebrates the vulnerabilities nurtured in online communities and invites you to share anonymously on the complexities of sibling relationships. Once you have whispered your sibling feelings to me, they will stay with me and I will never use nor share them. <br/>
<p>Solar Sibling is an online performance of shared loss about leaving
and siblings. This project used 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 feelings are secretly whispered to me. When you do, by typing into
the comment box, your feelings are sent to me and the first act closes
as the sun rises.<br/>
</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="solar1.png"
@ -65,30 +81,42 @@ alt="The fillable comment where you can whisper your feelings to me." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">The fillable comment where you can
whisper your feelings to me.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hermit Fantasy is a short story about a bot and a hermit. It started when I conducted a survey about receiving emotional support on the internet. This is an imagined response to an email I received. The story explores the loneliness of both being online and offline. As an act, it's a series of letters, click by click.
<br/>
<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. As an act it’s a series of
letters, click by click.<br/>
</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="hermit1.png"alt="The first letter."/>
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">The first letter.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="hermit2.png"alt="The last letter." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">The last letter.</figcaption>
<imgsrc="hermit2.png"class="image-80"alt="The second letter." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">The second letter.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cake Intimacies is a performance that took a year to bring together. It is a small selection of stories people told me that I held to memory and rewrote here. The stories come from two performances I hosted.
<br>
In the first, I asked participants to eat cake, sitting facing or away from each other, and share stories about cake and the internet. I hosted the second performance at the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival. There I predicted participants' future internet lives using felted archetypes. In return, I received stories about feeling strong emotions on the internet.<br/>
<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 performances I hosted.
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 performance was hosted at the Art Meets Radical Openness
Festival, as part of the Turning of the Internet workshop. For this
performance, I predicted participants’ future lives on the Internet
using felted 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.<br/>
</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="cake1.png"
alt="The first story and its memory illustrations." />
alt="The first two stories and their memory illustrations." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">The first two stories and their memory
illustrations.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="cake2.png"
alt="Another story on a phone." />
<imgsrc="cake2.png"class="full-image"
alt="The second stories in the way they were meant to be experienced." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">The second stories in the way they were
meant to be experienced.</figcaption>
</figure>
@ -104,10 +132,10 @@ story in. A great big mess of transcendence into the digital, of
intimacy and of bodies. The way it always is. Thankfully.<br/>
</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="biscuit.png"
<imgsrc="biscuit.png"class="image-95"
alt="Accept My Cookies, biscuits for the performance." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">An early prototype of Accept My Cookies, biscuits for
the performance.</figcaption>
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Accept My Cookies, biscuits for the
@ -16,28 +16,28 @@ Is all intimacy about bodies? What is it about our bodies that makes intimacy? W
I made three backplaces for you to see, click, and feel: Solar Sibling, Hermit Fantasy, and Cake Intimacies. 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.\
{.half-image}
{.half-image}
Solar Sibling is an online performance of shared loss about leaving and siblings. This project used 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 feelings are secretly whispered to me. When you do, by typing into the comment box, your feelings are sent to me and the first act closes as the sun rises.\
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. As an act it's a series of letters, click by click.\
{.image-80}
{.image-80}
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 performances I hosted. 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 performance was hosted at the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival, as part of the Turning of the Internet workshop. For this performance, I predicted participants' future lives on the Internet using felted 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.\
{.full-image}
{.image-80}
The play ends as all plays do. The curtains close, the website stays but the stories will never sound the same. For the final act, I give you the stories. It's one last game, one last joke to ask my question again. Digital intimacies about the digital, our bodies and the cakes we eat. For the last act, I ask you to eat digital stories. To eat a comment, to eat a digital intimacy. Sharing an act of physical intimacy with yourself and with me, by eating sweets together. Sweets about digital intimacies that never had a body.
There is no moral, no bow to wrap the story in. A great big mess of transcendence into the digital, of intimacy and of bodies. The way it always is. Thankfully.\
{.image-95}
{.image-95}
You open the page, and you are asked to write the characters you see
in a captcha. E5qr7.
eSq9p.
8oc8y.
Fuck.
You try not to panic, but you know you have been detected.
in a captcha. \
E5qr7.\
eSq9p.\
8oc8y.\
Fuck.\
You try not to panic, but you know you have been detected.\
You pack up your things: the pie I made you, a love letter, two
hands made out of felt, a star, a door, a stuffed animal; and
you leave again.</div>
## references
## THANK YOU
Special thanks to Marloes de Valk, Michael Murtaugh, Manetta Berends, Joseph Knierzinger and Leslie Robbins.\
Extra thank you to Chae and Kamo from XPUB3 for the food and moral support in this trying time and to my other xpubini for being great and eating my snacks and gossiping.\
But most of all I'd like to thank the people in the online communities I've met and loved, you were of course who this thesis was about. Thank you for saving me, I will always remember you.\
## references
Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of
self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and
selves’, Symbolic Interaction, 31(1), pp. 33–56.
@ -1002,7 +1007,8 @@ century’, Posthumanism, pp. 69–84. doi:10.1007/978-
<p>I perceive the document as a unit and as the fundamental symbolic
interface of the bureaucratic network. The transformation of the materiality of a document into a scenario to be enacted collectively in public aims to examine these artefacts and highlight the shrouded performative elements of these processes.</p>
interface of the bureaucratic network. The transformation of the
materiality of a document into a scenario to be enacted collectively in
public aims to examine these artifacts and highlight the shrouded
performative elements of these processes.</p>
<p>I see the collective readings of these scenarios as a way of instant
publishing and as a communal tool for inspecting bureaucratic bordering
publishing and as a communal tool of inspecting bureaucratic bordering
infrastructures. How can these re-enactments be situated in different
institutional contexts and examine their structures? I organized a
series of performative readings of my own bureaucratic literature in
different spaces and contexts, pubic and semi-public WDKA, the Art Meets
different spaces and contexts, pubic and semi-public WDKA, Art Meets
Radical Openness Festival in Linz, the City Hall of Rotterdam where I
invited people to perform the play together, like a tiny theatre.</p>
invited people to perform the play together, like a tiny theater.</p>
<p>This chapter is mainly a constellation of some prototypes I created
@ -673,8 +678,9 @@ these metrics are twofold: they play a role in the marketing sphere,
attracting potential students to the university as well as they are
utilized in interactions and negotiations with the government, which
increasingly cuts budgets allocated to universities.</p>
<hr/>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../aglaia/quality.jpg"
<imgsrc="../aglaia/quality.jpg"class="full-image"
alt="The linguistic experiment of the Quality Assurance Questionnaire Document" />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">The linguistic experiment of the Quality
Assurance Questionnaire Document</figcaption>
@ -711,7 +717,7 @@ contradictory feelings or thoughts. Over-identifying with a role was
being instrumentalized as an “interrogation” of one’s own involvement in
the reproduction of social discourses, power, authority, hegemony.</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../aglaia/queue.jpg"
<imgsrc="../aglaia/queue.jpg"class="half-image"
alt="Leeszaal West Rotterdam - November 2023 – People queuing to receive their documents and sign. I was thinking of queues as a spatial oppressive tool used often by (bureaucratic) authorities. The naturalized image of bodies-in-a-line waiting for “something” to happen at “some point” under the public gaze in an efficiently defined area." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Leeszaal West Rotterdam - November 2023 –
People queuing to receive their documents and sign. I was thinking of
@ -720,8 +726,9 @@ authorities. The naturalized image of bodies-in-a-line waiting for
“something” to happen at “some point” under the public gaze in an
efficiently defined area.</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr/>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../aglaia/mitsi.jpg"
<imgsrc="../aglaia/mitsi.jpg"class="full-image"
alt="One of the forms that the audience had to fill out during the Lesszaal event" />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">One of the forms that the audience had to
fill out during the Lesszaal event</figcaption>
@ -763,13 +770,10 @@ paths, how departure or arrival is smooth or cruel. Are there emotions
along the way? For some people these are documents “that embody power —
minimal or no waiting, peaceful departure, warm and confident arrival”
(Khosravi, 2021).</p>
<figure>
<imgsrc="../aglaia/passport1.png"
alt="Part of the A6 booklet of the transcription of the passport readings session" />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Part of the A6 booklet of the
transcription of the passport readings session</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><imgsrc="../aglaia/passport2.png"/></p>
<hr/>
<p><imgsrc="../aglaia/passport1.png"class="full-image"/> {.full-image}
---
{.image-80}
@ -57,6 +58,7 @@ TTY was produced in april-june 2023 as special issue 21 with guest editor Martin
{.image-95}
{.image-95}
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