By Jillian Mayer, Miami artist

Want to make sure your grandchildren know who you really are? Why not record a diary that reaches out to future generations and encompasses your true self. I did just that as part of this film commissioned for the 2011 Borscht 7 film festival. Leave a legacy. Happy Mother’s Day.

Artist Statement for I Am Your Grandma I Am Your Grandma is an autobiographical video diary log (vlog) that Jillian Mayer records for her unborn grandchildren. Envisioned as an authentic solution to fleshing out the detached model of the family tree, Mayer hearkens to bygone times when ancestors could glimpse one another through a locket or lock of hair. However, Mayer’s experiment in familial documentation reveals a dark side: a question of artifice at the crux of preserving her identity. The envisioned success of Mayer’s virtual self as a surrogate grandmother arises from her childhood immersion in American television. Conditioned to accept as reality the indexical reading of sitcoms and advertisements, Mayer fashions for her grandchildren a similarly eclipsed version of herself. By publicly exposing her vlog, Mayer conducts a phenomenological study of how people create and interpret emotional significance. Mayer’s egalitarian inclusion of anonymous viewers with her imagined grandchildren questions the very definition of family and intimacy in Web 2.0 culture. Yet as au courant as keeping a vlog may seem, Mayer’s sentiments could fall tragically short of her grandchildren, who will be vaulted into the media and social reforms of the mid-twenty-first-century by the analog-to-digital inertia of Mayer’s generation. How does one preserve ephemeral sentiments when modes of production are equally unstable? Mayer also questions her own mortality in the presumption of her absence that undercuts the need for a vlog. I Am Your Grandma is ultimately an expression of the timeless motive for art-making: to create something from nothing, to offer a legacy, to give birth.