Instant Relatives was installed in the WaveCave gallery at the California Institute of the Arts from April 13–19, 2025. It contained over a hundred anonymous found photographs sourced from antique stores and flea markets. Visitors were invited to explore, interact with, and move, but not remove, objects. Recordings of overheard and invented conversations, arranged for five voices with an approach informed by motets, plainchant, and the operas of Robert Ashley, played back at random in the space. Text became attached to several archetypal characters. Projections of text and tape loop-based drones were also included as additional motet voices.
Instant Relatives aims to externalize and entangle memory. Any one visitor is unable to hear all the conversations, see all the photographs, and experience all the combinations of conversations and photographs, but a collective experience arises. Certain details jump out as common observations, echoing the way certain memories of ours reinforce themselves and others remain unvisited, unconforming to causality. The collective experience of all the installation’s visitors is an inversion of the multiplicity of anonymous experience implied by the conversations and photographs. Our experiences become anonymous, even within ourselves.
On the night of Thursday, April 17, 2025, six characters gathered in the installation. They spoke to each other, trying to arrive at a collective memory of one single staircase.
Thank you to: Sofí Jáquez (“Margaret”), voice and setup. Brooke Moncada (“Frances”), voice. Jules Evens (“Aidan”), voice. Ivan Cunningham (“Dave”), voice. Kat Niles (“C”), voice and setup. Davide Umbrello, Max/MSP help and setup. Peter Hager, setup
Joe Hayes is a composer, songwriter, and poet based in Los Angeles. He has most recently explored multimedia installation, experimental folk songwriting, and the dynamics of large-scale collaboration. They are interested in everything that comes from allowing imperfection into the artistic process. Along similar lines, they view play and self-plagiarism as serious drivers of artistic inspiration. He is particularly drawn to abstraction, nonlinearity, and general weirdness. Joe is a graduate of the Hartt School and the California Institute of the Arts.