Jouska

This multimedia publication includes audio and video clips embedded within the PDF. This was organized, designed (including the cover), and edited by myself while I was working at the Centre for Conscious Design.

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This project was undertaken at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown. The digital space is a medium, one through which we create new things. But for the digital to become human is to give way to a new organism, a new way of thinking, and a new way of feeling. This brings me to Jouska - both the publication and the definition of the word. Jouska is "[a] hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head ... which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life..." and so on. My compulsion to have conversations with myself became a creative pastime during the lockdown. My conversations were not bounded by poor internet connection, my inability to understand someone else, or even by sound.

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Conversations took on shapes, colors, forms, different paces. Thought became the ultimate medium - and while it was a remarkable feeling, it was also a contradictory desire for solitude and for normal human connection. Jouska the publication speaks to both of these aspects, it is ultimately a unification of solitude, a diaspora of digital creations conversing. A solitary building stands imposingly, glitching in the darkness as the digital swells and overwhelms. A butterfly is trapped - is it a companion or a hostage? Somewhere, a traveler moves through a train station. Somewhere, an explorer moves through the desert. There is a breath. A utopia is imagined. A daydream passes. Here we all are -dreaming. Solitary voices come together and speak the inanimate into existence.

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