Both Sides All At Once - Baltimore, MD

Truces are negotiations to find something less harmful than what has been or something less exhausting than further communication. Two or more sides of an argument electing to put down their weapons, their wishes to win, be right or be just. They are, at their best, a practical decision to salvage relations or to protect a shared future. 

As people wrestle through truces, they wrestle with themselves. The internal wrestling is not what the other party hears - they hear the ways that the person is translating themselves and their wishes. And we certainly never hear both internal rumblings at once, we read the treaty or hear about the fight. We engage with the product, not the process of coming to a truce.
​
Truce, which premiered at the Sondheim Semifinalist Show in July 2019, shows two internal monologues, each playing out in one person’s head as the two parties come to a truce. The internal monologues are paired with different edits of the same footage, portraying different perspectives on the same situation. 

Truce is now online, with both channels playing beside one another. This means that the viewer gets to experience both sides, all at once. Click here to watch Truce.

As Call Your Mom edited, we wondered what the repercussions of putting the two channels into one video were exactly. Some of our questions about our artistic choice are:  
- How does the work change if we are able to hear both internal rumblings at once, a feat impossible in reality? 
- Does its edit create further neutrality, or does one side seem more “right”? 
- If the audio is spaced so you can hear every word, does the piece become argumentative instead of contemplative? 
​- Do our biases inform the way we edit, privileging one type of emotional processing over another?
What can watching these two channels at once offer to the viewer?