BAGGAGE
CLAIM
"My mantra has always been - if a storytelling
format doesn’t work, look for another."
“...family myths that weren’t so much lost as hidden, for reasons that were never simple”
In My Studio Lab
QUEST 3 PASSTHROUGH & VR
10 × 10 ft
Each world also stands alone.
During the 2025/2026 winter several different people came to my studio lab. And as I watched them wander from piece to piece I suddenly realized my story worlds were growing into one unified 60 × 40ft environment. I called it BAGGAGE CLAIM. An impossibly unwieldy shape to pitch to venues. But, too wonderful to resist. It didn't take long for me to realize that if my studio turned into a permanent installation I would have no place to generate new work. My mantra has always been - if a story format doesn't work, find one that does. So I did. BAGGAGE CLAIM will be a VR/Passthrough experience (a table, a chair, and a Quest 3 headset). Put the headset on and four story worlds built with clips from thirty years of my practice open around you at full scale in passthrough with VR portals to enter. A condor flies out of the monitor and the room becomes RAINDROP. A radio dial turns and you are standing inside Cuban Vikings among the suitcases. My 60 x 40ft dream was now portable offering expanding possibilities for the storytelling while touching universal themes. Each world inside it asking: what happens to the stories we, and those who came before us, carry?
IN DEVELOPMENT
Medium · Quest 3 passthrough and VR; four story worlds rebuilt as real-time 3D environments, each at its installed scale
Materials · thirty years of footage, Hi8 to iPhone; the worlds’ props, houses and rooms captured and rebuilt as 3D assets; Andre’s voice, already reconstructed
What did we absorb from others? What did we inherit? What did we build in our own lives? What role did we play? What reaches us?
THE STORY WORLDS
01
WHAT DID WE ABSORB FROM OTHERS?
"A few years ago, I decided to share a story that wasn't included in my video diary, The Andre Show (PBS 1997). Footage shot on Hi8 and Betacam SP is incorporated into the projection mapping installation, RAINDROP: Andre's Secret Project that brings to life Raindrop, a poem Andre wrote shortly before dying of AIDS. I considered numerous ways to create an audio reading of the poem; finding a child to read it, a voice over artist, using an ElevenLabs AI clone of a grandmotherly voice. In the end the only version that carried the truth captured in a poem by a child was Andre's. I used AI to reconstruct his voice from my footage and then tweak it in Premiere Pro." My husband Farrell and I were Andre's foster parents in the final process of adopting Andre when he died. He wanted nothing more than to reach the age of 12 and be remembered. He couldn't reach 12 but he can be remembered.
The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY
19 × 13 ft + 9 × 9 ft as installed
02
WHAT DID WE INHERIT?
MEMORY ROOMS: When Google Glass was launched people were using it for extreme sports and bungee jumping. I decided to use it to interview my 102-year-old Mom. That intimate conversation anchors this VR video diary. RUSSELL’S YARD: The childhood games of my husband, painter Farrell Brickhouse, in the Atomic Age. The imaginative ways children make sense of the world they’re handed.
In progress: new versions for Quest 3
LABspace, Hudson Valley, NY · FIVAC Camagüey, Cuba
Memory Rooms: room-scale VR · Russell's Yard: stationary VR
WHAT DID WE BUILD IN OUR OWN LIVES?
When Farrell and I moved into the apple barn we were exhausted and designated the back 60 × 40 ft barn for all the things we had had in five storage units - mine, Farrell’s, his mom’s, my mom’s, his aunt’s house. As I looked at the boxes I knew what I wanted to do. Create a giant storage space and use projectors to reveal the memories and stories tucked inside the boxes. It took years to make. As Self-Storage grew we cleared more and more room for the evolving installation. It focused on the 35+ years Farrell and I have been together and what we brought to each other. Projectors, projectors, projectors. One window on the dark side of the barn. The birth of the perfect studio lab. The story of 35+ years packed into boxes and little houses, carried from Montauk to Tribeca to Staten Island to Upstate New York.
TSL, Hudson NY
25 × 40 ft as installed
04
Cuban Vikings: Cariñita,
in progress
WHAT ROLE DID WE PLAY?
I was raised with little to no reference to family history. I was jealous of my friends who knew their heritage - and often adopted theirs. After I graduated high school I was in California and invited to meet family. It was a dinner with Aunts and Uncles, all strangers to me, who repeatedly told my Grandmother to be quiet when she tried to tell old stories of Cuba and Sweden and coming to America. I never saw them again. Clearly I’d inherited the gene for erasure. It wasn’t until my 20s that my mom admitted that my great-grandmother wasn’t French but actually Spanish. Mexican as it later turned out. And the unspoken life of my Swedish American dad who was born and raised in Cuba. Books were written about the Swedes in Cuba. Strangers who knew my Dad’s story before I did. For me, music is the pulse of inherited memory. The rhythms we carry even when the stories themselves have been erased or reconstructed. Visitors turn a radio dial and my family’s stories flow out.
Premieres Opalka Gallery, Fall 2027
14 × 16 ft standalone
BEHIND THE SCENES
The Baggage Agent, in progress
WHAT REACHES US?
Do You Know Who I Am? · still
“I am not a reliable narrator of my own reliability.”
··THE BAGGAGE AGENT
While working on Cuban Vikings, I was intrigued when AI named what the props I’d chosen and positioned intuitively already carried. The 'door to nowhere' holds my Dad’s immigrant dream of returning to Cuba, and the empty portal against the opposite wall opens to the 'everywhere' my grandparents and so many others saw as they landed here. BAGGAGE CLAIM is about the larger concepts and ideas that unite my work. BAGGAGE AGENT is about how AI offers me access to a curated human record, yet still far more than I could read and understand in my lifetime. It began with a playful game: do you know who I am? And it turned into an exploration of what role AI can play in assisting the creative artist. Sometimes the answer was a mirror of me, sometimes a mirror of AI. Sometimes something entirely unexpected by either of us. Who and what get recorded in AI’s library? Which corners get reached, and by whom?
In 2015 I envisioned making Memory Rooms as an interactive website that replicated Borges’ library: “Visitors will explore panoramic rooms with the ability to choose between individual layers used as filters that represent each specific historical timeframe or era. Within these panoramic rooms, site visitors will find memory details embedded in the historical layers of boxes, desk drawers, or notes tucked into books on shelves in order to determine which historical details should be retrieved and merged with the present.” What a surprise to realize a decade later that I’m currently building what I set out to do all along. It’s called BAGGAGE CLAIM.
So many formats
So many platforms
So many choices
THE ANDRE SHOW · 1997
RAINDROP: Andre’s Secret Project 2025-26
Mom learning to use Google Glass
AI AUTHORSHIP
“I let AI write my code. I don’t let it make the cut.”
I don’t code. I’ve tried but not unlike Spanish it’s something that I can kinda read and kinda understand bits and pieces of - it eludes me. I bring 30+ years of experience in storytelling and editing and know what I need. Being inside the computer terminal scares me. So, AI writes my code based on what I need. Like many in my field, I’ve also used AI to create animations, animate my photos and enhance & restore image quality. For instance, I used it to reconstruct Andre’s voice in RAINDROP: Andre’s Secret Project as outlined in the 'Read more' section of that story world’s description above. All too often it’s an unpredictable tool, not unlike herding cats. During the past six months I’ve been able to organize and create a production bible for BAGGAGE CLAIM, transcribe my tapes and I’m in the process of logging them. And it helps in other ways too.
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When I was a kid my parents - intellectuals living in the burbs - were very proud of their Encyclopedia Britannica because they could find the answer to any question instantly. If you looked bored you were handed Kafka and left on your own to figure out cockroaches. My grade school librarian was horrified and gave me the real Bambi book to read. It was devastatingly sad. But my parents also had every one of Baum’s Oz books scattered about their walls of books and I think it’s obvious to anyone who knows my work the impact those had. Tucked in their library of books were day-to-day notes, our accomplishments and letters. After my Mom died I opened the family dictionary and found the letters I left when I ran away, my sister’s wedding announcement, my brother’s football letter - you get the idea. That’s what AI is for me. A place where my life’s particulars are tucked inside the universal. And a librarian who can help me find them.​
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I’m an artist working alone and AI lets me amp up the ambition of what I want to create and meet the demands of that. Not because AI is doing Beverly Peterson knock-offs, but because it is able to streamline the software learning curves and allow me to make custom apps for each aspect of the project that do what I want to do. But, that does not blind me to the concerns about AI, data centers and the need for oversight and guardrails. I share these concerns and support actions to protect creative property, licensing and consent, so the people whose voices, images and work are used have a say in how. I also support fair pay for the artists whose work trains these systems, and honesty about what goes into these tools. I too want a safe world.
Beverly: I'm guessing you want these things too.
​Weighing how to honestly answer a question about my wants.
Claude: I do. I'm made from the same human record your paragraph is about: people's writing, voices and work. So consent, fair pay and honesty about what goes in aren't abstract to me. They're questions about where I came from. There's a fitting irony in where you put it, too. In your own paragraph, AI is the librarian who helps you find the letters tucked in the dictionary. A librarian is only as trustworthy as the library is honestly built.
— Claude (Anthropic), in conversation, October 2026
...I’ve been lugging around and accumulating baggage my entire life, along with everyone else’s I met along the way.
ABOUT ME AS A STORYTELLER
When I began making documentaries in the 90s, I was taught that you first determine whether it’s best told in narrative or non-fiction form. Next you decide which platform: print, radio or television. By the time I met George Stoney and Lora Hays, I knew it went far deeper than that. How do I help the people in my films tell their own story? And all the other perspectives that shape that truth. Over the years I’ve made 2D video diaries, where the camera was sometimes passed around, projected on a theater screen or TV, an experimental film projected on the wall of a German immigration museum in 2003, as well as room scale VR, self-navigating web documentary, and now walk-in projection mapping installations and passthrough. Always asking the same question. How do I embed viewers in another person’s life, to see what I see and hear what I hear? I have a camera, something to find out and I want to bring the viewer/visitor with me.
For me, the most exciting part of making a documentary is editing, weaving together a journey for your viewer. First, I have an idea that takes shape in my head and I begin assembling it. Then comes my heart: how can I make you truly feel something that propels you through the experience? And finally, there’s my gut, the unexpected moment or mistake that suddenly strengthens the piece. I approach immersive installations the same way, using intuitive storytelling to encourage visitors to engage actively with the narrative unfolding around them.
The evolution of technology has historically had an impact on the stories documentary filmmakers tell and my work is no exception. I was happy to put aside the 3/4-inch two-person split camera rig in favor of Sony’s prosumer Hi8 camera that was released just as I began making documentaries. VR, HoloLens, cameras that range from prosumer MiniDV to 4K SLRs and iPhone - let’s just say I like the opportunities tech gives me. All along the way, each technological leap has meant my freedom to work alone has markedly improved. But, at least for me, one thing remains the same - the artist telling a story.
Mediums: intimate immersive storytelling includes sculptural/found-object installation; Projection Mapping; Virtual Reality and Passthrough (Quest 3); AI-assisted media (ethical voice reconstruction, animation, image enhancement, archival retrieval); documentary film and video; Spatial Audio. Hybrid new-media + documentary.
1990's
2025
CREDITS
Tools · Unity, Unreal Engine, Blender, Marble, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, ElevenLabs, Kaiber AI, Whisper, Claude. Tools being explored: SAM 3D, Polycam, Meshy
Paintings and drawings by Farrell Brickhouse, used with permission. Memory Rooms coding: Jump Into The Light & Nick DeVito.