Glitchtown 02: Texting with Ruth
Digital Video
9m 15s
2019

Grandma Ruth was born in Detroit during the early 1900’s. Throughout her lifetime, she witnessed the rise and fall of the Great Motor City. By the time of her death, the Internet was in its infancy and the city was entangled in a perpetual state of glitch. Due to the limited availability of archival media, her rich personal history dissolved with her passing. Glitchtown 02: Texting With Ruth attempts to interpret this first-person experience. The film presents a fictional conversation, between the filmmaker and his grandmother, about the history of Detroit.

In an attempt to refresh the limitations of childhood memory, the filmmaker presents an experimental version of the Detroit experience. Within the current technological setting, we have the ability to maintain a detailed record of personal historicities. Through the use of email, social media, and text messages, our future relatives will be able to access an ongoing narrative of our daily selves. Conversely, the present generation, for the most part, has limited access to documentation about family members who lived during the pre-digital era. Within the last several decades, we have amassed an archive of digital artifacts that has altered our relationship between the past and the future.

Glitchtown 02: Texting With Ruth places emphasis on this profound moment of digital transformation. Similar to the introduction of the printing press, our accepted notions about lineage and temporality are being fundamentally redefined. Within the current environment, our unpublished digital memoirs are being authored through a daily sequence of posts, selfies, likes, and retweets. Moreover, our perceptions regarding mortality and renaissance are fixed within a trajectory of rapid fluctuation.