Everybody Hurts
“Everybody Hurts” is a transmedia experience. It is a website, several videos and a series of embroideries which focus on various aspects of the experience of mediated emotion through the vehicle of television stills. Each embodiment of the project is pivotal to its meaning, because it emphasizes a different context for viewing and understanding the work. For example, the video slideshows can be seen both as large projections in a fine art gallery and as Fan-Vids on the website or on You-Tube. The embroideries have one meaning when experienced virtually on the website and another when viewed as art objects in a gallery setting.
The website has a hybrid identity: part conceptual art piece, part television fan site, part archive. It gives the viewer an opportunity to become part of the work by submitting a testimonial of his/her own experiences with mediated emotion, while the embroideries, videos, and the stills gallery reference the artist's personal experience.
The tears we cry while watching television characters experience the pains of living are as much for ourselves as for these fictional characters. Viewers who become "too" involved with TV shows are often criticized as escapists, but humans have told and heard stories throughout history. We need them to understand who we are, as individuals and as parts of a culture.
EverybodyHurts.org is a hybrid art/fan site, which explores the idea that mediated emotion is as real as non-mediated emotion. It tells the story of my own personal connections to contemporary televisual fiction, while exploring such methods of meaning-making as collection, appropriation, cultural participation and creation.