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 Good Pie. 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 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.

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.

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 perfomances I hosted. 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. The second perfomance 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.

I love you and hope you see what I saw in these stories.

Safe dreams now. I will talk to you soon.