“ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
“The Confessional”
an audio - visual storytelling installation
Caption: What is love. A sample of answers to one of the posed questions. Play to hear.
Then scroll down for the actual installation video.
This project brings to life the stories of people we have around us but of whom we don’t get to ask enough to really know. They speak to the many definitions of love and the different kinds of love we experience as humans. I wanted to know: “What do we risk when we offer the small act of love to someone who needs it?”
The masks, the sacrifice, and the gift - were the three aspects of love through which I framed this investigation. Why? I thought about my own experience with love and I’ve realized that even though I want to maintain a loving attitude, sometimes it’s hard. I thought of it as a kind of mask because in my heart I know there is love. Another thing I noticed is that loving is not always easy or pleasant; it often requires effort, time, and energy. I thought of it as a kind of sacrifice because when we love, we can and we do persist through all kinds of adversities. Lastly, I thought, even in the moments when I don’t feel loving, when it’s difficult and would rather give up, if I remember whom I aspire to become and how I want to carry myself in the world - love comes through because it’s always there. It just needs a nudge to be awakened and it becomes a gift.
The result of over 20 personal accounts (32 hours) was an audio / visual installation and performance where the audience could experience the stories in an intimate setting, speaking to the individuality of each person and the universality of the human experience with love, while seeing the people who spoke to them in projections of their portraits playing on the centerpiece installation called "The Confessional." The audience could also step into "The Confessional" space - a circle of 10 ft in diameter, set up with comfortable sitting, carpet, and enclosed in dark satin fabric - to share something personal with the artist while viewing the projection of the portraits from the inside. Special lighting and an incredible soundscape designed for the project filled the room with ambience.
This project invites us to challenge our beliefs, to expand our window of tolerance towards the uncomfortable, and to know ourselves capable of more, fostering and deepening our connections with each other and ultimately our capacity to love.
"The Confessional" installation and performance demo. Press to play the video.
THE OVERALL FLOW OF THE EXPERIENCE
This is the final form of the installation where the recorded stories are played back to the community so we can all learn from each other.
The audience is invited to sit at available stations for as long as they want, there is no particular order to them.
Who feels called to speak with me, is invited to enter the ‘confessional’ space and share whatever is on their heart and mind.
The three stations are characterized each by a framework. They are placed around the confessional at a relative distance from each other with only one pair of headphones to invite reflection and contemplation. It was important that the audience comes as close to the narrators as I was during the interviews while also being able to hear the surrounding sound.
The lights circle around the structure, and are synced with the soundscape changing color temperature according to the soundtrack. Each track was created by my NYU fellow Etienne Mason, to speak to a kind of love covered in the conversations: sacred, brotherly, and familial love. See tracks listed below the text.
The portraits of the interviewees are projected from inside the confessional and can be seen from the outside as well so the audience could connect the stories they hear with the people who told them but in no particular order.
The stories people tell are about their first memories of love, their definitions; the importance they give to honesty, expectations, and boundaries in loving relationships; they touch on technology, the sacred, the state of the world, and their wishes for the future.
The three frameworks + three stations through which the love story was investigated and could be experienced: masks, the sacrifice, and the gift of loving. Those stories also included definitions, conflict resolution, the role of technology in our relationships, expectations and boundaries, etc.
“Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.”
THE USER JOURNEY EXPERIENCE
Here is the layout of the space:
On the bottom of the frame we can see an onboarding/off boarding area separated from the main room;
In the main room (top of the page) we can see the central structure for 1:1 conversations;
And 3x stations around the confessional where the recorded stories could be listened to;
RESEARCH
In this book Erich Fromm makes the argument why love is important, it is basically linked to our survival and evolution as species, he lays down the challenges of how in a capitalistic society love is the least on our priority list and how we’ve been conditioned to be less invested in values like love in the market economy to the benefit of “feeding the machine”, and then he makes the case that love is an art to be cultivated and gives a few pointers on how to start on the journey.
In the spirit of this approach he goes on to state if love is an art, then it requires knowledge and effort.
a. We as a society approach love primarily as that of being loved, he says, rather than loving, as our own capacity to love. Hence the problem we face is how to be loved or how to be lovable.
b. The assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by - is difficult.
c. There is the confusion between the initial experience of “falling” in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or better said “standing” in love. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting.
He proposes that there is only one way to overcome the failure of love - to examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love.
These three aspects of my life informed this project: my Christian tradition, my meditation practice and photography.
I’ve drawn inspiration from philosophy, psychology, art, tradition and mysticism.
The circle of the confessional is a symbol for the psyche and the world in general.
Software:
Madmapper (Projection unto 3x screens)
Ableton (different audio output at 3x different stations)
Unreal Engine (Synching DMX lights with sound)
PROJECTION:
These were the books informing the project.
“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. A good definition marks the starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination, we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love - starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.”
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
The triangle of the stations symbolizes our relationship to the Divine, at the base of the triangle being our human plane reflecting our human interactions.
TECHNOLOGY USED:
Equipment:
3x Optoma GT2100 Projectors
1x Mobile Audio Rack + 3x Martin Audio CDD-LIVE 8
Scarlett 6i6
DMX Lights
DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS & ITERATIONS:
I tested with cotton material for projection and loved the quality of the projected images but the enclosure wouldn’t have been communicating the meditative feel I was going for. I started experimenting with different fabrics. I knew it had to be dark to convey a sense of intimacy within the ‘confessional’ setting and the challenge was how to project from inside the ring to be able to see the images from the outside of the ring as well. Projecting from outside the ring would have required more than x3 projectors due to the nature of mapping a circular structure. Out of four black fabrics that felt right from a tactile and visual perspective, the only material that was giving a painting like feeling to the images, would transmit enough light through the fabric to still see an image on the back, and assure a sense of comfort and intimacy of the ‘Confessional’ space from the overall environment where people would experience the audio stories, was the black satin.
Credit: Ker Chen (MadMapper)
Credit: Etienne Mason
Sound:
Light:
Lighting had the purpose of emphasizing the ‘Confessional’ structure as well as aiding the soundscape sound and create ambiance by changing color temperature with each subsequent soundtrack.
The Sacred Love had a cool tone to it. The white light was to accompany the track for the Brotherly Love, and amber was assigned to the Familial | Romantic Love.
The soundscape carried tones of water elements, the void of the Universe, and beats resembling our heart rhythms.
Credit: Noa Kirschbaum (Unreal Engine+DMX)
why The “Confessional”
WORK IN PROGRESS:
I started with the drawing board to understand what form would best serve this project and to help create community.
The projection of the portraits is a metaphor for how often we project in love;
The main considerations for the installation involved the projection, the sound, and the lighting design to create a sense of immersion, intimacy, and concept alignment.
Inspiration: The Living Project. See minute 0:23
DMX lights moving in a circular formation changing color temperature with each subsequent sound track.
Inspiration: Jesus Academy | Holy Fire appearing upon Patriarch's prayer in anticipation of Orthodox Easter.
Sound design involved thinking how to disseminate and share the love stories (over 32 hours of audio) in an intimate and impactful way, on one hand, and on the other, how to create an immersive soundscape and environment in which the audience could enter a different world altogether where novelty, exploration, and choice was available to them while also feeling safe, calm, and at home within the landscape and its elements.
The result was three stations with comfortable mattresses spread across the room in a triangle formation where one person at a time could hear stories through the headphones while also being able to hear the sound of the ambient music, which created intimacy with the narrator yet not completely removed from the experience as a whole. The speakers were placed also in a triangle formation with sound, manually manipulated from the audio rack, traveling through the room in a “breathing” pattern to create a sense of movement and aliveness.
Credit: Alex Park (Sound Production)
Historical Context: The vessel for these conversations became – the confessional. The ritual of confession has ancient roots and can be traced back to various religious and cultural practices throughout history. The purpose was aimed at spiritual purification. In psychology, this concept is illustrated by the idea of “deep listening”. And in love, this is one of the practices for connection.
To confess means to be “bluntly truthful”. The confessional is not about the process; the confessional is a tool for people to become truthful with themselves. The same principle applies to love and in love.
Interviews Atmosphere: In setting up for interviewing others, it became very important to create a space where people can feel safe and able to open to confess their truth about love.
The invitation
A story that synthesizes most of what my colleagues care about illustrates the power of ‘a seed’ planted with love. How love, in the smallest ways of action, can influence someone’s attitude towards life and the way they move through the world.
We don’t have to save the world but in whatever we do, if we do it with love, we might as well change the world.
“The love which simply exists, however fortunate, however blissful, however satisfying, however poetic it is, still must survive the test of years. But the love which has undergone the transformation of the eternal by becoming duty has won continuity; it is sterling silver. Only when love it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secure. The love which has undergone the change of the eternal by becoming duty does not merely love as it is loved - but it loves. The command “you shall love” consumes and burns out what is unsound in your love.”
FINAL PRESENTATION:
During my listening sessions, I’ve been noticing a visceral response going through my body while listening to some of the testimonies, particularly when people would talk about something deeply personal and felt. I could describe it as a current discharging from the brain stem down the spine line and length of the arms as well as temperature shifts from hot to cold and hot again with a particular sensation in the abdominal area. I run some testing with a home device called Spikerbox from Backyard Brains to get data from heart sensors and brain activity to track the impact of listening. However, the movement would get in the way and data would be altered thus yielding misleading results and making it impossible to maintain a space of sharing, free from distractions.
My goal with continuing this work is to see how listening as a tool for cultivating love is showing up in our neurochemistry and translating to a sense of connection between individuals. It would provide a visual feedback to what we intrinsically feel and live. Having a ‘proof of concept’ perhaps would encourage us to intentionally aim for it, cultivate it as a practice, and excel in forming our connections mindfully and wholeheartedly first with our closest kin and then building outwards embracing and strengthening our community.
I have been corresponding with Dr. Zoran Josipovic, a neuroscientist at NYU who studies non-duality and consciousness, and with Dr. Michael Bagnell, founder of the Brain Center in Miami, FL who is dedicated to understanding/restoring brain neurology to people who have suffered brain injury. They offered important feedback giving me a clue to further areas of research. Both have suggested to investigate the insula region of the brain, which controls the autonomic functions through the regulation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems given that the medical field is moving away from a truncated way of understanding the functionality of our bodies and instead looking at it as a whole living system. The other insight related to the first, was to measure for the galvanic skin response - the change of the electrical properties of the skin which offers a direct insight into the changes I have felt running through my body in a more rapid and accurate way when it comes to gathering data. It wouldn’t necessarily provide exact scientific proof deemed for a peer reviewed publication, nevertheless, would be a good indication of impact and an establishing of a connection between two people when the right conditions are met. I would measure both the activity of the listener and the person sharing the stories against the content of the recording to identify if there are areas of correlation and therefore connection between the two and the content of the conversation.
Thesis Advisor: Theo Ellin Ballew
ITP Class 2024