Stephanie Tripp
University of Tampa
Stephanie Tripp is a digital media scholar and artist, and an associate professor of communication at The University of Tampa. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in English with a specialization in digital media theory. Her work investigates community identity, collective memory, and knowledge legitimation in the digital age. Her scholarly work has appeared in Materialities of Literature, Media-N, Journal of Film and Video, Explorations in Media Ecology, Textual Studies in Canada, .dpi, Rhizomes, and Electronic Book Review. Her media work has been shown at exhibitions sponsored by the International Digital Media & Arts Association, the University Film and Video Association, the West Tampa Center for the Arts, and the City of Tampa.
Home Unstaged
Home Unstaged is a 360-degree immersive video that explores my personal experience with a national phenomenon–disposing of a family’s home once elderly parents move away or die. Immersive reality is used to convey both the familiarity and intimacy attached to one’s family home and the estrangement of a mediated environment that both promises and denies presence in a space still close in memory, but materially removed. Miming the real estate virtual tour–one of the first popular commercial applications of 360-degree video–Home Unstaged is set in the empty rooms of my childhood home using footage I recorded a short time before its sale. Within this highly charged space are text, images, and videos that connect my personal experience to a broader cultural phenomenon of the conflicted and often irrational choices many adult children face in managing the affairs of their aging parents. Embedded media include, for example, old family photographs, videos of me disposing of household belongings, an audio recording of me reading a family narrative in the empty house, and a voice recording of my father not long before he died.