Package Received — Mineral Creative

Package Received was an improvised interview done with of the Experimental TV course. Four crew members were instructed to send a package containing an object to the director’s home address. The object, which represented a sentiment not yet expressed, would be unveiled live while the crew was asked questions about the nature of their ideal confession.

An improvised image of me and Luke over a photo that Celeste provided of a hand holding teeth. This went along a package they sent me that had small plastic teeth.

Celeste and I talking about the teeth that they mailed over and why.

Luke and I playing with the OPUS card that they mailed to me, as well as the envelope they sent.

A photo album Rodrigo, Camera Person 1, mailed me that included pictures of memories.

The empty cigarette cartridges that Pramaswari sent over. We discussed their battles with addiction and how it relates to their nationality.

Package Received is a video piece I wrote and directed inspired by the difficulty of communicating over long distances. Part talk-show interview, part improv, and part therapy, the piece explores personal narratives as they relate to the conscious acts of sending and receiving communications, whether they be parcels, questions, answers, or signals, through items mailed to me by the crew that would be filming me.

The intention behind the piece was to build a space of trust and play with the studio crew using materials they chose. I am interested with this piece in exploring how a staged televised confession about something that they may not quite feel comfortable saying but
are willing to communicate about could create an opportunity to unveil other motivations of why keep this hidden, where this information belongs, and who should know about it.

The live performance took place in the TV studio at Hunter College, utilizing a desk as the central site of interaction. I asked four of the film crew members to take pictures of and then mail, to my personal home address, items which represented sentiments not yet
expressed. I then brough these items with me to the TV studio at Hunter College, where I had a desk to open the photos. As I would open the packages, I would be speaking into a microphone, and a colleague, Luke Popadics, managed the speech-to-text document that
was being streamed into the program as well. Three cameras caught various angles of the studio behavior. Lastly, the photos they sent were also sent to the program.

These created several layers:
My intention was to engage in a dialogue about the object’s significance with the sender, creating a space for improvised reflection and confession, but veered in multiple directions.

The visuals consisted of four primary layers:
1. The live text stream generated by the TTS interface, projected in real-time.
2. Photographs of the objects mailed by the crew, displayed within the video frame.
3. Three camera angles capturing the artist’s actions, studio dynamics, and moments of stillness.
4. The Zoom conference feed, which functioned as an additional layer of mediation.

These elements were edited into a cohesive video piece that maintains the tension between live spontaneity and production structure (script, crew, class time limits, etc.) The resulting work is both a document of the performance and an autonomous artwork which documents the particular difficulties of the crew members and the general complexities of televised personal narratives.

The idea behind Package Received was to build a space of trust and play with the studio crew, using materials they personally chose and sent. This process enabled a collaborative exchange, originated in the vulnerability and agency of the participants. By staging a televised confession, the piece questions the relationship between visibility, intimacy, and performativity in communication.

Through the act of sending and receiving, the piece investigates what happens when private sentiments are externalized into public discourse, mediated by technology. What compels us to share certain truths while keeping others hidden? How does the medium of
communication—whether a package, a photograph, or a digital text—affect the authenticity of what is expressed? And finally, who has the right to receive or interpret these disclosures?

Download Script