Emily Sasmor’s CLOSE TO YOU (2024) is an animated visual opera exploring queer love through 55 androgynous characters— “Drifters.” The work is live streamed in three parts, the first of which is replayed below. Viewers travel to the destination by car as they are serenaded with several different tracks of music. Once they reach the destination they meet the Drifters who move the user through the story that Sasmor constructs “from fictions, musical forms, mysticism, and the maximalism of the internet.”
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Digital America interviewed Emily Sasmor in November of 2024.
The next stream will air on January 25th at CLOSE TO YOU, twitch, and YouTube.
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Emily Sasmor is a new media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Their projects have appeared in shows, festivals, and screenings including; Curyatid in Hudson Yards (New York, NY), 20/92 Video Festival (Philadelphia, PA), Squeaky Wheel Animation Festival (Syracuse, NY), and Digerati Emergent Media Festival (Denver, CO). Recent awards include a Cultural Counsel Video Grant and first place in Digerati Emergent Media Festival’s Digital Dialect section. They received a residency at the School for Poetic Computation and are setting up an experimental art publishing house named NIGHT EYE TV. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.
