confessions documentation
a text installation by joel swanson / js@hippocrit.com

+ project statement
This project looks at the architectures of confession, the discourses they contain, and the relationships of power that they animate. In this installation I use these relationships of power as a formal and textual foundation, to highlight, invert, and pervert the methodologies of power that they employ. I am interested in the transgressive and how it is psychologically reconciled through cultural constructions. This project is not about inverting the confessional in anachronistic attempt to overturn religious structures of power, but to highlight the very human practice of mediating what one thinks is transgressive and the socially constructed technologies that enable that mediation. How does one cope with memories of having transgressed one’s ethical or moral system? Where is contemporary confession practiced today and what technologies facilitate its existence?

+ installation description
This project consists of two elements:
1. A wall spray painted with a quatrefoil pattern (the quatrefoil is an icon based on an abstraction of a cross used in Catholic art and architecture. It is commonly used in the screen that bisects the chambers within the confessional.)
2. An abstraction of a confessional booth that contains a series of digital confessions based off of the question, "What would Saint Augustine say in a chat room or blog?" These confessions are retrieved and revealed through the user's interactions with a mouse. The confessions are accompanied by randomized sound events.

+ thesis paper

+ confession sample (please have the flash 5.0 plugin installed and your sound turned up)

+ video samples

+ installation images