heidi j. boisvert

Media Diet

Co-Creator

Media Diet is an immersive documentary style exhibit I co-created with Amar C. Bakshi, and is commissioned by Twenty Summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The exhibit rebuilds real people’s media rooms and plays the media they consume. The exhibit invites visitors to spend time in the reconstructed spaces of Americans. By inhabiting these distinct “information worlds”, visitors are able to experience how different Americans see the same story in radically different ways. It’s a visceral way to understand how media fragments our shared reality, and what it might take to cross those lines.

The production draws from my “Are You What You Watch?” research with the Norman Lear Center and Pop Culture Collaborative by situating visitors within dominant media ecosystems that map to distinct psychographic and ideological clusters in America.

I, with creative technologist Jingyao Shao, developed the underlying custom show control and API scraping system that delivers dynamic, personalized content across devices and spaces, allowing the experience to scale across venues. Media Diet plans to tour nationally in partnership with media literacy organizations, with the goal of addressing polarization and fostering social understanding.