Event 2

Today, I went to the presentation created by Christina Yglesias. The picture on the left is an introduction to her artworks. Christina's artworks are made up of four videos, which mainly explores "intimacy, disconnection, and emotional labor" in text messages between two strangers. Through this experience, I gained a deeper understanding about online texts. 

I really like Christina's artworks. It is closely connected with people's life. If I were to summarize her artworks with one phrase, it will be the relationship building with strangers through texts. Below is a selfie with Christina. 

These works started when Christina had a woman seeking non-Romanic pen-pal post on Craigslist. Christina told me that almost 30 people at first responded to her, and some of them stopped texting. The four videos are created by the longer conservations among the 30 of them. Afterwards, Christina found some actors on Craigslist to read these text messages. She shoot each actor individually. Hence, in the ending videos, two people act according to the script made from the text messages. The two people seem to connect and interact, but they never meet with each other.  The picture on the left has the longest “conversation”, which is around 20 mins. 

When I was watching these video, I found that people interact through text messages in a very interesting way. They use the words "yeah" and “haha” a lot in their texts. The actors sometime give different facial expression for the same phrase, and the same phrase has totally different meanings. In these videos, I feel that both actors want to be sincere, but the combination (presented in a form of conversation) makes the sincerity disappear. One of the reasons might be that the cast used his expressions in a wrong way.

Another topic often being discussed is Christina's race. Since you never meet with people whom you are texting with, you do not know their races. For example, she told me that when she told the women about her major, the women directly asked if she was Asian.

The picture below is one of the cast of the four videos, just thought that it was a good photo. Also, I think it is rather direct between strangers with online texts. For example, in one text, the guy directly commented on her breast, which is not very much likely to happen in a real world. Since the texts are between strangers, people care less about what they say. Another worth noting point is that Christina specifies that she is seeking a non-romantic pen-pal for her project, but people (especially male) still want to cross the boundary and make it become romantic. 

It is definitely a great event, and I recommend people to go because it shows me a perspective on what I am doing when I text with strangers. It makes me realize how insecure and direct people are when texting with strangers. People are intimate and disconnected at the same time. I always interested in exploring the relationships between people. This event shows me some creative ways. I can transfer some common ways of communication to unusual ways and see how that changes the perspective and influences the relationship between people.