Conversation Four: Medium

  • Conversation One: Interviews (Based on interviews with family)- Completed, Installed in the Skidmore library, Listen online: (https://on.soundcloud.com/htTTU)

  • Conversation Two: Letters & Recordings (Based on archival audio tapes and letters) - Research finished, Script finished, in the process of recording

  • Conversation Three: Empty Chair (Based on empty chair therapy sessions)- Research finished, Working on script

  • Conversation Four: Medium (Based on sessions with a medium) - Starting research

  • Conversation Five: Chatbot (Based on interactions with AI model) - Not yet started

  • Conversation Six: Voice Memos (Based on conversations with myself in the car) - Not yet started

Research

In the fourth conversation I will base my father’s answers on conversations with a medium. For this research I would like to visit Lilydale Assembly, a community in western New York supporting mediumship and healing since 1879. Lilydale is one of the largest centers of Spiritualism and was where the Fox sisters’ house was moved before it burned down. It is important for me to have these conversations with a medium in person and a visit to Lilydale will allow me to meet with multiple mediums. This grant would support a three day trip to Lilydale. In the fourth conversations some of the questions will be:

Where are you now?
What does it feel like to know your life was so short?
What do you wish you could tell us?
What are you thinking about now?
What have you learned?

Photographic Collaboration

For each of the conversations I have developed a photographic project that is exhibited with the sound piece. For the fourth conversation I would like to create a spirit photograph. I will work with the Penumbra Foundation in New York to create a portrait of myself and my father using traditional tintype techniques. Tintype is made almost instantaneously through a process that uses hand poured chemicals on an enameled sheet of metal. I want to use the tintype process because many of the spirit photographs from the 1900s were tintypes. To prepare for this photograph I have been studying the spirit photographs in the Tang collection with Rebecca McNamara.