Yensen’s project focused on how overexposure to media influences young people to develop obsessive and prejudiced tendencies. As a creative component, Yensen made a feature-length film that explores a case study of fanfiction writing and its culture as a depiction of these tendencies. The story follows one college student, Beverly, after a man is killed outside her apartment building and the body mysteriously disappears. Through online messages with her friends, phone calls, zoom classes, and interspersed fake movie clips, commercials, and other media inserts, we experience her life as it is online. As viewers, we are forced to reckon with our own usage of the internet, encouraged to understand ourselves through the characters and their experiences. However, the audience is also purposefully removed. Yensen made a fake language with its own typeface, which was added as subtitles throughout the film.

Yensen LeBeau

Project supervisor: Nina Tecklenburg