The Undone: Do It, Part 3
mixed-media sculpture, audio

University of Michigan, Green Road Studios, 2023

Funded with support from an Arts Engine AIIR Grant

The Undone: Do It is a three-part body of work that tells a choice-based story that explores the desire to start over, try again, and make different choices while engaged in caregiving for a terminally ill loved one.

Participants call a hotline number containing a choose-your-own-adventure story navigated like a customer service phone line. The same way caregivers spend hours on unnavigable phone trees attempting to organize care, participants are confronted with impossible choices, missing information, and the repeated directive “you have to make a choice.”

A wooden cabinet contains a patch bay connected to a network of cracked smartphones, an audio system, and a video loop of me riding a stationary bicycle in an exercise of futility. Participants plug a cable into different channels on the patch bay at moments in the story where they, positioned as the story’s protagonist, need to make a choice. Participants respond to their high-stakes role as caregiver in a situation that has set them up to fail by flipping between channels that Change Perspective, Escape Into Fantasy, Warp Time, and Party.

Participants can click through a text-based version of the story on a desktop computer.



︎︎︎ Home