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print this pageDown the Rabbit Hole: Responsive Research & Fluid Practice
Delaney Hoffman
Friday, October 10 - 2:40PM to 2:55PM
College for Creative Studies
For some months, the research for my most recent project was headed in a solid and determined direction through archival and traditional means; my hard drive filled up with PDF's and my Inter-Library Loan list grew, but this was fundamentally changed when I realized that the real source material I was looking for could only be found through a specific TikTok algorithm. That meant that I needed to be the one to train it.
This project, entitled Bootleg Prophit, is the subject of "Down the Rabbit Hole." While stemming from an initial interest a perceived spiritual void that our secular society has cemented, I began constructing a world centered around a central, prophetic character through a combination of self portraiture and landscape imagery. Engaging more closely with the cultural phenomenon of neo-spirituality and prophecy, I realized that my research was missing a fundamental digital arm. This talk will track the development of this work since freeing my research from the archive as it considers algorithms, memes, and close engagement with social media psychics with equal weight to traditional scholarship, emphasizing the importance of combining the two.
In combination with current imagery, this talk will present the screen recordings, biblical passages, artist biographies, radio play clips, eBay seller pages, and defunct forums that have allowed this project to shift its concerns from solely social media prophecy to a project centered in broader ideas of devotion, obfuscation, object-ness, and queerness. In considering research as a fundamental creative tool, Down the Rabbit Hole prioritizes the exploratory (and fun) research that drives me to answer the open-ended questions at the core of this project: What does it mean to allow ourselves to "fall prey" to a prophetic personality? To choose to believe, to prove that we believe?
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