ITP Thesis Archive 2025

Project Description

The Space Between Us is an evolving archive of intimacy, distance, and the emotional architecture that binds or unbinds us over time. It is a quiet study of distance—not only in geography, but in belief, identity, and time. The people we once loved, the friends we once confided in, slowly shift form as we grow, as they grow, and as the world places new questions between us. Some separations come gently; others arrive with rupture. But even in absence, something lingers. A tenderness. A wondering.
This installation holds space for that residue. Through generative prompts and anonymous contributions, it gathers the emotional footprints we leave behind in relationships that couldn’t or didn’t stay the same. Visitors respond to questions that ask not for certainty, but for memory and contradiction.Each response becomes part of a living archive. It returns not only as a drifting fragment on the shared screen, but also as a reflection—reshaped into a gentle reply, offered back to the participant with care and intention.
Built to evolve with its audience, the piece has no fixed shape. It is co-authored by those who pause to engage with it. Over time, it becomes a quiet ecosystem of overlapping truths, gestures of care, and invisible thresholds between one person and another. It does not seek resolution, but resonance.
In a time when ideologies divide families, when identities complicate once-simple bonds, and when distance—emotional or otherwise—feels inevitable, The Space Between Us asks: what does it mean to still hold love, when it no longer fits inside the frame it once lived in?

Technical Details

This project is a browser-based interactive installation built with p5.js for the frontend and Glitch (Fastify + Node.js) for the backend. The experience begins with a generative visual layer where fragmented text phrases drift across a canvas, rendered using p5.js with animated transformations.

When motion or user interaction is detected, the sketch transitions to display a contextual prompt alongside a QR code, which links to a mobile web form hosted via the same Glitch backend. Users can scan the QR code on their phones to submit their personal responses to the prompt.

Research/Context

The Space Between Us emerges from a deeply personal intersection of memory, geography, and voice. Rooted in the artist’s upbringing in India, the project is shaped by a culture where intimacy often lives in– midnight conversations with friends, stories passed down by grandparents, and silences shaped by generational memory. The artist’s own family memory is entangled with the legacies of Partition and migration—relationships shaped by the forced distance of borders and the silent griefs that come with them. These histories are rarely spoken directly; instead, they show up in the way someone folds a letter, the way a conversation trails off, or in the silence after someone says “we were close, once.” This piece is an attempt to archive those almost-conversations—those fragile threads of love, loss, and distance that often remain undocumented.

Alongside this cultural inheritance, the artist’s practice is sustained by a long-standing journaling ritual, kept since the age of 18. These private writings form an emotional database of their own—tracing the evolution of self in connection to others. Many of the prompts used in the piece originate from these journals, reframed to be held communally rather than alone.

Artistically and academically, the work draws inspiration from affect theory, poetic computation, and feminist thought. Influences include Sara Ahmed’s work on emotional politics, bell hooks’ writing on love, and Bhanu Kapil’s experimental approaches to fragmentation and voice. Technologically, it uses generative systems to hold contradiction and multiplicity, not to resolve meaning but to reflect it back with care. In this way, The Space Between Us becomes not only an artwork, but a quiet social space—one where strangers co-author a shared emotional landscape in real time.