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---
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title: Project
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author: Stephen
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author: Ada
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---
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# Title
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### Grad project Description
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BackPlaces is a web-based anthology that explores intimate and emotional spaces on the internet. It consists of four pages, each embodying an archetype. The sunrise, the nosebleed, the star, and the hand.
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Hi.\
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I made this play for you. It is a question, for us to hold together.
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These pages trace a thread of online emotions: of shared grief, collective processing through writing, youthful excitement, and finally, of being on or off the internet.
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They present stories in the formats in which they were originally told, allowing you to imagine yourself as one of these pages, wearing your own clothing as a costume and reenacting the play of your first kiss.
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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.
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This project tenderly pays tribute to the rawest emotions found online. It seeks to diversify the conversation by reminding us that the internet is a reflection of the people and feelings that inhabit it. The web is an artifice—a house built by others where we live and communicate together. If we all left, the internet might cease to exist.
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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.
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However, the internet can be a harsh landscape where sensitive individuals find refuge in backplaces, rooms where they can be more than their physical selves allow. Here, they meet, whisper secrets, share laughter and pain, and grow together until they move on. These stories reflect these moments, drawn from the collective knowledge of people I’ve loved online. Their words have been woven into stories to protect and celebrate them. Some were social media comments, some were friends sharing cake, some were emails, and some were conversations.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Good Pie is a great big play of pies, a performance that took a year to bring together. It had three phases. First, as my friends left, I baked each of them a goodbye pie. Then I hosted two performances. 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. In the second I predicted participants' future lives on the Internet using felted archetypes and received stories from their Internet past in return. This website is a reflection of all these experiences. Each Good Pie has a filling that tells a story, merging the bodily with the digital and making a mess of it all.
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I love you and hope you see what I saw in these stories.
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Safe dreams now. I will talk to you soon.
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