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Public installations (collaboration with Christopher Baker)

Secrets, Private Conversations, and Personal Musings
-a collaboration between Jes Schrom and Christopher Baker

We live in separate studios and collaborate within the walls of an experimental media studio marked by a found sign that reads "Brain Modeling Laboratory." Each member of our collaboration brings vastly different artistic styles and foci.

In collaboration, we examine the recombination of everyday objects with the unseen, private and mundane. Our current work attempts to navigate issues of accessibility, disposability, materialization and the attribution of value.

This artistic work, which appears to be a common paper towel dispenser, was designed for installation in a public restroom or wash area. When an individual approaches the towel dispenser with intent to dry her/his hands, s/he will be faced with an unexpected choice. After advancing and tearing the towel from the dispenser, s/he will notice fine black text of varying densities printed on the paper hand towel. Further inspection will reveal printed secrets, found Internet chat conversations, short stories, personal e-mails, and other bits of private communication. Hands dripping, her/his mundane routine interrupted, s/he will consider the messages on the towel and quickly grant or deny them value. Will the towel be preserved for its aesthetic and informative qualities, perhaps only preserving its potential value to someone else, or will the towel be used for its common purpose and be quickly discarded?

In concept, we have taken a ubiquitous public object-the paper towel dispenser-and combined it with equally common, but normally hidden private conversations. These conversations and secrets were harvested from the artists’ personal e-mail correspondence, public Internet chat-room conversations, and "found" chat conversations sniffed from local wireless network traffic. In preparation for this project, Jes sold her artwork for secrets and stories, Christopher harvested wireless chat conversations using free publicly available network sniffing software and both gleaned private conversations from personal email correspondence. The act of harvesting and employing text that was intended for a single (or no) viewer and subsequently displaying it in a public space requires an un-apathetic response from the participant. The participant is obligated to confront questions of value surrounding these seemingly private conversations, particularly the value or disposability of the volume of private conversations that fill the virtual space of the Internet.