Frances Stark: My Best Thing

She regularly draws from popular culture, literature, and her own personal life, often exploring expectations and assumptions about gender that inflect her identity as a woman, artist, teacher, and mother.

First presented at the 54th Venice Biennale, Stark’s My Best Thing is a feature-length animation in the form of a serialized soap opera, constructed from interactions in online video chatrooms. The female protagonist’s flirtatious discussions with random participants soon expand beyond sex into broader topics including film history, politics, and protest, and she gradually grows fond of some of her interlocutors, who transform from strangers into confidants and collaborators. Produced using a text-to-speech animation program from the scripts of virtual encounters, My Best Thing highlights the manner in which current communication technologies allow for both greater intimacy and anonymity, giving rise to new kinds of behaviors and relationships.