Waiting for Hello
2020

Spurred by the global, circumstantial increase in virtual interactions, Waiting for Hello is a collection of clips from publicly posted Instagram livestreams. To create this video piece, I began by mining through Instagram for random live-streamed videos that were tagged with #iglive. I then selected videos and clipped them to show each person from the moment they went live until just after they greeted their audience. Sometimes this pivotal moment of human connection took only a few seconds; other times it took the presenter over a minute before they directly addressed their audience. At times this felt like an invasion of privacy. I felt like an uninvited voyeur peeping into their personal space. But the truth was that these were public videos available for anyone to see at any time.

Waiting for Hello highlights the absurdities of our current times, our extreme reliance on screens and network connection to meet almost all of our daily communication needs, and our continuous struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies that mediate our interactions with others. But Waiting for Hello is also a glimmer of hope for the future. It illuminates the universality of the human experience, as we see clips from all over the US, India, Malaysia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Croatia, the UK.

Each person was brought to the virtual space of Instagram for a different purpose. Some are there to discuss religion or spirituality; others offer content about beauty, self care, diet, or fitness. Some present tips on entrepreneurship, real estate investment, and marketing; meanwhile, others talk about food, music, arts and culture. But it’s not their planned content that we care about in Waiting for Hello. Instead, it’s the unplanned moments that we focus on. Waiting for Hello highlights the gaps of time during which each presenter is still getting prepared or waiting for an audience to accumulate before they begin the substantive content of their live interaction. These gaps of time are widely ignored by most who bare witness to them, but it is actually in these interstitial moments that we experience a poetic range of human behavior: portrayals of anticipation, nervousness, ennui, playfulness, self-assuredness, confusion, and frustration.

Waiting for Hello demonstrates how humanity inevitably seeps through, even in an increasingly digital age. In subtle form, it shows how human connection persists despite monumental setbacks—monstrous histories, centuries-long conflicts, divisive current events, and scarily unpredictable futures.