“Greetings from Maine” is part electronic love letter and part ambient serenata connecting the forests of Minnesota and Maine. It was created in response to “Unanchored,” an exhibition featuring visual works by Sarah Kusa and Chad Rutter, building on themes of geographic dispersion, the rural/urban divide, intimacy across distance, homesickness, farsickness, and technological (dis)connection.

“Greetings from Maine” takes the form of a text that I wrote which was designed to unfold in real time over one hour via projection on a screen at Silverwood Park Gallery in St. Anthony, Minnesota. It includes live original music written and performed by are you ready to be destroyed (Christina Collins). The text and music were developed concurrently, trading drafts and samples by email between Christina in Minnesota and myself traveling in Maine—our very process of collaboration embodying the themes that we were parsing in the work.

I was not present at the gallery for the performance, but instead hosted a simultaneous gathering with Theo Goodell and Karen Cellini at a farm in New Portland, Maine, through which our group generated an additional layer of text and imagery on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram under the hashtag #GreetingsfM. Minnesota audiences were invited to use the same hashtag to respond and share their own images and videos while listening, looking, reading, writing, resting, and wandering as much as they wished.

Through the nature of social media, the audience base expanded to people across the US and beyond, who caught wisps of the work on various platforms out of context, both during and following the live event. The performance in Minnesota also generated a batch of postcards written by members of the Silverwood audience and were mailed to the farm in Maine.