I made this play for you. It is a question, for us to hold together.
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.\
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.\
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.\
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.\
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.\
@ -207,7 +207,7 @@ his connections, finding no way to do so except by
emphasizing their tangible bodily experiences.
The community’s claim to authenticity thus had to lie in the physical experiences of its members— the visible
bodies and hearable voices, the weddings, births, and
funerals (1993).<sup><spanclass="margin-note">You’re dreaming again, good. Would you feel closer to me if you could hear my voice?<br> Is my voice a sound? Could it be a feeling?</span></sup>
funerals (1993).<sup><spanclass="margin-note">You’re dreaming again, good. Would you feel closer to me if you could hear my voice? Is my voice a sound? Could it be a feeling?</span></sup>
Even then, and even by people with no interest in
undermining the value of the virtual, the distinction
@ -32,6 +32,8 @@ Excerpt from xpub application letter, March 15th 2022.
<!-- # felt cute might delete later
<sectionid="keylogger">
2023-11-24 17:52:55,103 - Key.tab
2023-11-24 17:52:57,175 - Key.alt_l
@ -415,7 +417,6 @@ Excerpt from xpub application letter, March 15th 2022.
</section>
<!-- # felt cute might delete later
*What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does "graphic design" even mean?!????!!1!?* is an assessment of what the term "graphic design" means to its practitioners today. Through experimental ethnographic research methods and the development of reflexive tools, the project highlights and questions the boundaries that exist around this apparent category. The research focuses on my own practices as well as other people and groups that identify with "graphic designer" as a label. The research was both conducted by and shared with interested parties in the form of the tools themselves, as well as a series of performances. There is no strict distinction between the research and its publication. The tools were released in an iterative cycle throughout the process of the project, and the research is conducted through the performative use and development of these tools.
