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ripple 



























































































































As I planned to install in the tidy gallery space again, I wanted to embrace the multi-spatial, hybrid way I’ve been making, sharing, and viewing work between screens and rooms, but I didn’t want it to replicate a structure of displacement.








I wanted to move through the screen into the other side, to put my work next to recycling piles, snoozing pets, backyards—to live, relying on the generosity of others, among the belongings.










I wanted my work to live in that middle space, one foot in someone’s corner apartment and one foot online. My installationwould not be an illusion, but rather a networked reality.















I decided post an “open call” on my social media to see if anyone wanted to host a wide variety of work, everything from collages to videos to sheer pieces of fabric. I received over 30 responses from people—friends, other artists, strangers—all over the world 



























As I sent out work, I began to turn towards other forms of “file transfer.” I dropped off objects on people’s porches, folded up work and stuck it in the mail. I created foldable sheer images, textual bars of soap. I sent instructions for pancakes spelling out a poem to be eaten
































































Even when communication was virtual, the handoff was far from tidy. It happened in my personal inbox, below a pile of opened browser tabs, next to emails from my grandmother and political spam. There were hearts (<3) and misspellings and errors.






There were texts and video calls when something malfunctioned, forgetfulness, understanding.







Awkwardness, miscommunication.






Astonishing generosity.





















As I in turn began to install documentation of everyone’s installations into a gallery space, I started to think about the glitch (soon after, I read Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell). I wrote this as I was processing the installation experience:







I thought about how the glitch has become such an aesthetic—vaporwave, 90s and 00s nostalgia—that we fail to see its everyday slippage.





























































I wrote: The rippled glass, slumped after years of being the slowest fluid, is a type of glitch, a slip through which we see the garden.












I live in a house with old windows, and this is what they look like:

















In my room—because a screen is always in someone’s room—the architecture of a screen is both a reflective surface and a material. It emits and gathers the light of someone else, in a garden I miss and remember, a garden I can’t recall. I am not interested in “domestic space” as much as I am interested in where we live, where the phone call is coming from.