Age of Loss: The Process

When I began developing my thesis, I knew I wanted to explore the ideas of loss and grief, and their place in our world. It wasn't really until I let that idea breathe in the break between semesters that I began to connect these concepts with the  increasingly virtualized world I saw around me. Grief and virtualization: I think they compliment each other well as dual purposes for my work.



I grew up in the “Rust Belt” in Northeastern Ohio, an area suffused with a kind of locational grieving. Once, I got back from a trip and the rubber factory that had once been a staple of the town's industry had finally been torn down. All that was left behind the fence was a single utility room with ripped off cinder brick on all corners. Someone had painted 'STAY' on one wall. Those scenes of sudden change, of derelict industry, were a primary feature of my childhood. I graduated into the 2008 recession, and didn’t know where to go.



Things don't stay, and nowhere is that fact more indicated than in virtual space. While our physical spaces are traded for virtual spaces (especially now, as so much work has shifted online during the pandemic) and our physical spaces shift and disappear, so do many of our virtual ones. When these changes happen virtually, they do so without a trace—no rubble, no crumbling ruins behind a fence.



In the framework I developed, the first 'act' of this body of work begins with an exploration of Spotify and how it attempts to create a strange 'Public from Nothing' by providing its listeners with music they think they'll like from who knows where, curated by algorithms. This piece literalizes this concept as a strange dystopian empty mall of music.



In the second ‘act’, A Vision, I explore interiority and physical space through photographs of my hair on the shower wall, using the shapes and figures contained within the images as a tool to examine questions of self and identity. The third ‘act’ of this work represents a merging or reconfiguring of physical and virtual spaces. In New Terrain I present virtual reality spaces that probe the contours of imagined space.



This mix of themes—the presence, inevitability, and constant shifting of virtual space; grief and loss—felt worth exploring. At the beginning of the work, the global pandemic felt like an event that stretched beyond the horizon and grief felt omnipresent. Even now, as so many begin to act like the curse is lifting (though it's likely not so soon), we will inevitably spend more and more time in virtual spaces in the years ahead. Loss, too, is something we're still not fitting enough in our framework of the world, as climate change, future global disasters, and unstable political contexts and markets assure that we're in for a healthy helping of loss in the decades ahead. Loss, diverse types of grief, and grappling with virtual space all feel valuable to explore. And so, we delve into our Age of Loss.