ASSIMILATED SPACE

A VISUAL POEM

The erasure poem has proven itself a powerful tool in reshaping language and meaning, effectively making something new by covering something up. assimilated space aims to investigate this action of erasure in the new digital age, specifically experimenting in how erasure affects time, memory, and identity within nonlinear narratives.

By investigating new modes of visualizing erasure, through digital distortion and audial environment, the succession of desensitizing videos, text, and audio hope to fully convey the potential meanings and affects of erasure. The nonlinear structure specifically targets the search for an unknown identity, one constantly shifting between the erasure of the past and limiting of the future. These convoluted connections, blurred lines, and infected emotions serve to construct the assimilated spaces constructed around the narrator.

As the narrator tries to reconcile with their identity, only now realizing past traumas and sites of erasure, the narrative forms around a desire to maintain an unknown identity without giving into the desire to assimilate through the uncertain process of self-erasure.

The realization of erasure is as powerful as the act itself, transcending past, present, and future as identity is found to be inherently connected to all three. It is up to the viewer to piece together these unanswered questions: Are the lingering emotions liberating or limiting? What are the true extents of self-erasure, and is it ever only self-motivated? What might the connections of erasure look and feel like in the search for identity?

// visual poetics & narrative professor patricia search

// rensselaer polytechnic institute