In the Spring of 2012, I began an art project, a performative intervention of sorts, with my long-distance partner, Laura. We had lived together for several years in Chicago before I moved to Los Angeles in 2011. We did our best to stay in touch by phone, text, email, and Skype. But the distance was hard for both of us.
In the course of making other artwork, it occurred to me that we could have a different kind of communication, on that was more physical in spite of the great distance between us. So we began exchanging our bedsheets through the mail, unwashed, every couple of weeks.
The sheets became a visual journal of our most intimate activities. The process worked subtly at first as the sheets collected sweat, scent and hair. Eventually they brought an intense focus onto everything that happened in our beds, driving us to intentionally stain and ruin them for each other, maybe as a stand-in for doing it together. The stains built up on the sheets, marking the passage of time, the passage of our physical existence, and the passage of our time apart.
The shipping process put this passage into the sharpest focus; to think of going three or four days without the sheets was torture, so we used overnight shipping. At one point there was a snafu with the mail and the sheets were delayed and we lost that connection for a few days; I was upset that the regular I had to use wouldn’t mean anything.
Intimate Instruments Workshop
The Linguaphone of Tremulous Communion is a musical instrument that cannot be heard by an audience. The Linguaphone is designed specifically for two players, who must face each other and bite down on the opposing ends to play. Vibrations transfer from the instrument through the teeth, using each player’s nasal cavities as a resonant chamber. The instrument’s tones are acutely (sometimes painfully) audible to players, but not bystanders.
Linguaphones are built and played by audience participants in a collaborative workshop-performance format, which serves as a vibrant exploration of relationships, cooperation, and community engagement, sparking new and existing social connections. Participants first work together to build and customize a Linguaphone, then perform together in a freeform public/private jam session.
During the Intimate Instruments Workshop hosted by Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum in April 2013, participants built their own Linguaphones of Tremulous Communion. Wooden and metal component parts, food-safe wood dyes and finishes, hand tools and instructions for building were provided to participants, who together built and played over 80 instruments.
“How are We Going to Talk After This?”
A video portrait document of conversations and performances between myself and my long-distance partner. We performed several portraiture-conversation sessions during in-person meetings over the course of five weeks, talking mostly about our relationship and the project itself. A body-mounted camera was created to capture simultaneous full-body video images of each of us during the performance. The camera straps onto – and is supported by – both of our bodies, physically constraining us each to face each other in close proximity (reaching distance). The performance was prompted by frustrations in our relationship that were magnified by long-distance communications media, specifically video chat software; the title is a direct quote from one of the recorded conversations.
Self Portraits with Computer Vision
Work-in-progress self portrait series using custom interactive software. Borrowing algorithms from surveillance software to continue explorations of interpersonal relationships through portraiture; the relationship of technology to the body through imaging and software analysis; and the overlap of digital and physical realms through transcoding and digital fabrication.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Some sample options from a Finder-based Choose Your Own Adventure workshop in Foundations Digital Media at Eastern Michigan University
