A W A Y
Before smartphones and social media, connection was a dial-up hum, a blinking away message, and a cascade of screen names. Away explores a lost digital adolescence—one shaped by AOL Instant Messenger, pixelated conversations, and the liminal spaces where youth unraveled.
This project weaves together archived AIM conversations, photographs of the spaces once inhabited, and reflections on how they exist today. These spaces—parking lots, back alleys, abandoned buildings—were more than just meeting spots; they were stages for rebellion, discovery, heartbreak, and fleeting joy. They held the echoes of skating, smoking, drinking, fighting, and falling in love. They were classrooms of identity, places where boundaries were tested, where friendships were built in late-night IMs and tested in real life.
Through chat logs, timestamps, and away messages, Away recreates the emotional texture of a time when communication felt both immediate and elusive. The humor, the angst, the longing—all captured in the syntax of a generation that existed between analog and digital, between home and away.
By revisiting these conversations and spaces, Away serves as both a time capsule and a mirror—reflecting a culture of youth that, in many ways, no longer exists. It asks: What happens to the places and people left behind? How does nostalgia preserve the ephemeral? And what does it mean to be "away"—then and now?
