Backplaces

ada, 2024

project website

Hi.
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.

love, Ada

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.