Homesick Hotline

Kathy Guo, Fiber, ’19
Anna Huff, Interdisciplinary Sculpture, ’18

Anna and Kathy are interdisciplinary artists working with traditional crafts and digital mediums. Anna’s current work investigates digital-based rituals. Kathy is interested in making playable spaces about culture, relationships, and childhood. They are both interested in creating a space reflective of family and the illusion of intimacy.


Project Overview

You’re missing your family and haven’t seen them in a while. Phone calls replace physical presence with intimate conversation. Is that enough to remedy homesickness? In Homesick Hotline, Anna Huff and Kathy Guo interview people in their community on the topic of home and family, to begin to understand the complex relationships between people and place. Our attachment to home is connected to the support and care that our family gave us. Now that you are away from home, what is it that you are missing? When was the last time you called home?



Process

After a lot of research, we settled on Twilio Studios because we wanted a pay by minute plan for our low call volume and for the flexibility of the system. With widgets, we did not have to code ourselves which was convenient but later on screwed us over. The Widgets had bugs that I ended up getting around through very time-consuming, tedious trial and error, and staring over a few times. And emailing customer support a lot.

Twilio is not user-friendly and is extremely tedious to do any task. After five days of doing nothing but work on twilio studio bugs I finally got it running. We were not really using the hotline flows for what they were built for and the system started to get finicky and over loaded. I’m glad twilio didn’t suspend my account over what I had been emailing them!



Presentation


Learn More

Creative Process Journal
Anna Huff Portfolio
Kathy Guo Portfolio