Permeable Bodies

Christine Bruening, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design

This project will investigate the dissemination and reception of digitally rendered artwork created and disbursed within the context of COVID restrictions through a series of outreach surveys and interviews. The project will be self-reflexive, and the interviews and survey results will become apart of the original project itself.

This project will combine the principles of art, media anthropology, and Film and TV Media research, respectively. Like many of us, I’ve had to reconsider how I could share my work during this globally momentous time. In response, I’ve built an interactive website that investigates the role that the house plays in horror movies, domesticity, and motherhood, and how our relationship to home has shifted during COVID. I would like to collect and record viewer responses to the work and reflections on their own relationships to home and ultimately include these responses on the website itself. The small package I will send to participants will include a risograph zine that will provide the viewer with additional information about the project and a sealed mini microwave popcorn bag to cook and enjoy while they navigate and experience the project online. My intention behind this package is to blur the lines between entertainment, art, connection, and comfort. I’m curious to see if eating popcorn while consuming images of horror within an art context shifts the viewer’s experience of the work in any way. I’m also interested in how involving a viewer’s response to the work may alter their relationship with it.