Handheld

Handheld is a video collage centering on a changing relationship with touch. Through the use of consumer-based technology and distanced collaboration, this project conveys our shared feelings of fear and loss towards physical intimacy. In eliciting visceral reactions to texture, sound, and touch, Handheld seeks to provide a sensory experience for the sense-starved viewer.

We are an emerging artist collective consisting of Kimberly Ho, Montserrat Videla, Jen Sungshine, Santana Berryman, Thuja Quickstad, and Zhanger. Our process was focused on non-hierarchical, lateral creation, but with an additional challenge: we set out to create the film over the period of a 2-week isolation. (Back then, this was the amount of time COVID-positive individuals were recommended to self-isolate.) We started what we called a WhatsApp Relay; essentially a WhatsApp group chat created for the sole purpose of sending video and audio to each other. The “relay” concept started as a method for creating material and responding to one another using the accessible film medium of smartphone recordings. We allowed ourselves to use Zoom as a group, but not to see each other in-person until the film was ready to be presented.

As we continued our Whatsapp Relay and got more specific, we gave ourselves the prompts: “How does limitation create or force new desires?” “What are the unexpected pleasures that we discovered in this moment of restricted touch?” “How much of that reflects a nostalgia and hope to return to moments in which a wider range of touch was possible?”

We focused on queering our preconceived ideas of smartphone filmmaking – rather than try and obscure our varying video quality, we chose to aesthetically embrace it. We were tickled by creating multidisciplinary work within the limitations of physical distancing, as well as implementing new modalities of distanced collaboration. Significantly, we had fun.

​In the absence of linear narrative, Handheld sought to elicit affective memory through images and sound. Affect, in this case, refers to an instinctual reaction to sensory stimulation that occurs before complex thought. Much like videos in the ASMR genre, this film is focused on the somatic experience of the viewer. What, we wondered, does yearning for “new touches” say about our desire to build new realities and worlds? This film also intends to capture the distortion of reality that comes with prolonged isolation. In our own two-week periods, self-imposing varying levels of isolation, we experienced touch-starvation and a blurring-of-time. We tried to convey this to each other with video and audio through the Whatsapp Relay model, and this project was the result.