Wonderful Life: Preview

Wonderful Life is a fictional narrative that unfolds in real time over the course of a month within four characters’ interlinked profiles on social networking websites. It is a satire about invasive marketing techniques, an immersive existential journey in which two characters struggle to find meaning through a product called Wonderful Life, and an experiment in dynamic storytelling.

The story may begin in several places: on the Wonderful Life product website, through a Facebook friend request from one of the characters, on Vimeo or Tumblr, where the characters host video blogs, and so on.

Responses to the project:

“Not Real. Please. Not Real.” | Discourse.net

“Lindsay McCove Went Out on a Date (A 30 Second Song)” | Rock Cookie Bottom

Components of the project:

Wonderful Life Daily Dot Com

Wonderful Life Community Group on Vimeo

Wonderful Life Fan Page on Facebook

Wonderful Tweets Twitter Feed

Chris Robst’s Facebook Page

Chris Robst’s Tumblr Blog

Lindsay McCove’s Facebook Page

Lindsay McCove’s Tumblr Blog

Dascha Rebane’s Facebook Page

Laura “The Fox” Fox on Vimeo

The Fox Factory Dot Com

Additionally, a website about the project, including more information about the story, the actors, and the participants, is forthcoming. Please check back for a link to this website.

Performance

As a “Truth Recruiter” I visited a classroom in the Bronx under the pretense of being a U.S. Army recruiter giving a presentation about life in the military. Instead, I spoke about the details of military enlistment that a recruiter would NOT discuss, such as the limitations of a “sliding contract” and the prevalence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, including the special implications of PTSD in women. I screened two video mashups, which I had created using U.S. Army propaganda and news stories that exposed problematic civil rights issues associated with military service. Then I revealed that I was not a recruiter, but a performer there to discuss concerns in an earnest way. I showed the news stories from the mashups in their entirety.

Mission Statement
Truth Recruit is an army of dreamers operating under the hacked brand of the U.S. Army, and working together to revise and appropriate military public image and recruitment campaigns. Through performance, motion graphics and video mashups, we discuss with young people what the U.S. Army actually represents beyond the romantic, professional advertising campaign manifested in video games, commercials, microsites, and print ads. The aim is to debunk any notion that young urban Americans have “limited options.”

“Messages from Veteran Affairs”

The video encapsulates my mission to illustrate the disparity between exciting recruitment propaganda and the traumatic reality of service as experienced by recruits. The performance itself challenges the basis of recruitment– that young, urban Americans have limited options– by demonstrating the accessibility of performance and media arts.

Trailer

Full Length

In three acts, “Viral Conversations” is a performance adapted from Iraqi blogs, where two Americans speaking in first person publicly exchange passages about living in war-torn Baghdad. We tactically position ourselves to be overheard in congested areas of New York City, where the 2007 holiday season provides a backdrop of luxury and distraction from the daily atrocities and struggles of the Iraq War. By improvising a conversation based on daily blog readings and internalizing the content in first person, rather than memorizing a script of passages and acting as the “other”, our performance speaks to personal thresholds of empathy and perception. As such, we consciously exemplify the tensions of dichotomous perspectives and experiences.

This project was developed with Erik Burke (http://www.eriktburke.com) from a memorial proposal submitted to Iraqimemorial.org.

In two parts, Missing People questions the intimacy of digital imagery. First, photographs of estranged friends or family were collected from 12 people, printed in half-tone on large kites, and simultaneously flown by contributors. This iteration, which created a social network on the ground, muses on the emotional value of digital imagery, aimed to create discrete, intimate experiences out of the symbolic event of a loved one at a safe distance away.

The second part was a private interaction between the contributor and the submitted portrait, where a pillowcase adorned with the portrait and an instruction set were mailed to each contributor. Recipients were directed to sleep with the pillow for one night and report back about the experience. This iteration examined the power of digital imagery to influence the subconscious.