Document:Q12121

News from Home Screen was created shortly after my move to New York, in a period of loneliness and primarily screen-mediated intimacy. Chantal Akerman's 1977 film News from Home, where the filmmaker reads letters from her mother over long, static takes drawn from her own early days in New York, brought me great comfort during this time. The film (which, at that time, I watched regularly on my laptop — an altogether different experience than witnessing it in the social space of a cinema), along with texts and emails from my own mother, softened my feelings of isolation.

As an homage, I trained a Markov chain to automatically generate letters from my mom, based on the messages she had sent throughout those early days. I paired them with Akerman’s original visuals, screen-captured in a desktop window, alluding to the intimate space of a laptop screen. Within this bounded frame, using the resources that were available to me at the time, I sought to create an algorithmically-assisted, renewable reserve of loving digital dispatches.