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I wanted to stretch my arms into other departments to test the permeability of disciplinary boundaries and to expand the ways I could create languages with different types of practitioners.  While taking a writing class, I met David Hall in the MFA writing program, aptly referred to as a truly multidisciplinary artist.  I was stuck by one particular project David presented in class, A Brief History of Loss, a digital “desktop performance” David used as a tool to investigate concepts of loss: loss of a human memory, loss of data stored on computers, and loss of functionality due to old or outdated equipment. 

I designed our interview to reflect David’s emphasis on the “digital” as a mediating mechanism by setting up a silent and remote digital communication over Skype and Google docs.  I sought to emphasize the ways people communicate on the internet, and how constantly jumping around from website to website, image to image has become ubiquitous in our contemporary digital culture.  I also wanted to capture a video of both sides of our screen, to show the sometimes forgotten other end, the real human on the receiving side of the digital communication.

We partially typed our correspondence, as well as pulled up images, webpages, and videos to further explain what we talked about, namely: memory, the digital world, glitches and loss of functionality, and authenticity and permanence on the internet.   Somewhat strange to converse in silence, yet oddly enjoyable, we talked for almost an hour until our computer’s time became increasingly elastic: the memory strain on our computers slowed down our Skype playback until time became too disorienting delayed.  Satisfied with pushing our technological mediators nearly to their breaking point, we ended our chat. 

The outcome of our action interview is a two-channel looped video I made, showing the video screen capture of my screen on the left, and David’s screen on the right, as a sort of “stereo-vision”, remixing the concept of interviewer and interviewee.  Additionally, the Google Doc captured the written components of our conversation, which you can view here.  For an enlarged, separated version, click to see David's screen, and Emily's screen.