When I was in high school, everything I internalized about the culture around me, my identity, and my relationships was mediated through my phone. How I expressed everything I internalized was also mediated by my phone, in terms of all the videos I took and shared on platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat, where I was a prolific private story poster. Earlier this semester, I asked my friend Alex if he could fix my iPhone from high school that was run over by a car in 2020. He was able to, and that’s the first video you see in the movie. I was able to retrieve all the old photos and videos I took, along with all the apps I used to have. I had forgotten that I had an app called VoicePitchAnalyzer, which had you record videos of yourself speaking daily, and then it would analyze based on pitch if you sounded feminine, masculine, or androgynous. At the time, I had a somewhat pathological obsession with becoming “straight-passing” so I used the app to try and change the sound of my voice. I had also forgotten how many videos I took of myself trying to speak with a different voice, and trying out different techniques of voice modulation. Originally, this project was going to be about the videos I took of my friends, and the ways we defined our burgeoning identities against the politics of our town. Realizing that the videos I most wanted to share the most were the ones I wanted to be on the Internet the least, I shifted my focus to myself and my room. I combed through my old camera roll, looking at all the videos I took of myself and also re-posted from the Internet. I am interested in how identity is formed in solitude and mediated by digital spaces, and how the dark moments of adolescence mingle with its inherit innocences. Since I’m inspired by sensory ethnography, I hope that viewers can pick up on the ways I defined and circulated meaning through the audio I tracked from 2017-2021. Evidence of joy, music, memes, dancing, low self-esteem, hope and fear all coexist in this film as it does in life. I hope the details of these relationships are what shines through and what offers texture and true meaning to this movie. Thank you!
Unfortunately, the file is too large for me to embed the video directly onto this website. Please click the Google Drive link below to access the video.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GvMxsJgpVhZDBDoH1vdQWJFCzcA4hFhF/view?usp=share_link
