A young woman searches for her early childhood. The fragments collide and tenuously connect. She struggles to reconstruct her history. A hesitation, and she starts again. Emotional truth provides little solid ground. A narrative erupts and immediately dissolves. Her desire for meaning does not mask her uncertainty. She re-examines her memory and assembles a new past.
A participant watches the young woman speak. Her words fill the space behind her image. There is no more room. Her words disappear and begin again. The participant interviews. The woman's image is gone, but her voice persists. The participant interrupts. The young woman is here again. She repeats herself, but what follows is new. Another intervention. Another repetition. Another path.
The young woman's stories are reflected in over one hundred short moments. The order she tells them in is determined randomly. Our desire to pull meaning from the the various fragments is inhibited with our awareness that the pieces follow each other arbitrarily. The encounter both portrays and reproduces the uncertainty of memory. Her desire to find truth infects the participant's desire to comprehend. Where traditional media transform memory into nostalgia, we are discovering what interactive media will manufacture from our desire.
"Boy" can be exhibited as a one-on-one experience, displayed continuously as an installation, or screened for an audience.