The Kids Spilt The Kool Aid

In the Fall of 2013, I installed a three screen generational time capsule in the first floor of the Weitz Center for Creativity in collaboration with CAMS 270: Nonfiction and CAMS 283: Site-Specific Media. The following video is documentation of the installation and turns the 3D phenomenological experience of the project and condenses it into a simple video work. 

Starting with a Huffington Post article about who Millennials are, I set about deconstructing the processes in which a generation can be boiled down to set characteristics and traits. By presenting a time capsule that overloads a viewer with information, I am asking viewers to wade through the work and create their own meaning and definitions of our generations. The work asks that you pick and pull and expand it to find a community representation. 

The combination of found footage, which represents the past and how we have evolved, the montage with intertitles, which shows us in the constructed present delayed by a mere couple of weeks and months, and the live webcam which represents our future create a nuanced time capsule and invites the viewer to still be in control of their image (via webcam). 

Below is the artist statement of the piece: 

We have seen it all and yearn to do something about it.

The Kids Spilt the Kool-Aid (TKSKA) is a meditation and ambivalent exploration of the generation of inbetweeners - the starting and endpoints, respectfully, of Generation X and Millennials. It is an experimental nonfiction work that serves as symbolic time capsule of our identities as individuals and a group. 

The three screens give the viewer the processes in which the generational generalizations are created. Screen one is the past, which we rebel against and create oppositional ideologies. Screen two is you and your subsequent choices after viewing the work. Screen  three is the constructed present -- a microcosm of our everyday, delayed only by weeks. Multiple layers of meaning in the work -- including this statement, the screens,  and your participation -- serve to create a more community-driven media representation of ourselves. This work allows you to become a creator of your own depiction.  

The work is loosely inspired by countless hours of scrolling through navy-blue Tumblr screens, terrible Huffington Post articles, and everyone who steps in front of the work. 

There exists no dominant meaning in the work. 

Please explore and find your own.  

The work will be displayed until the middle of winter term at Carleton College in the Weitz Center for Creativity in the CAMS Lounge.