Backplaces
Hi.
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.
