A winner of the Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest (Second Place), ‘Pursuit of Sadness’ is an audiovisual collaboration between Lea Wülferth, a writer and visual artist, and Derek Muro, a composer and sound artist, built around the following repeating words displayed on screen and interspersed with other images:

he gets himself a balloon / he lets it fly away / he flees to the attic / he cries

Born from a dream in which a friend said her 2 year-old son sought to experience the depth of sadness, it’s a simple story on its surface. But repetition changes it. We can’t get that initial pureness of feeling when we go through the same motions over and over. And eventually sadness may turn into a new experience, such as letting go.

Over 7 repetitions we start to perceive the story differently as well, and as the soundtrack changes from literal to more abstract the immediacy of feelings fade, and we are left less with sadness than a feeling of peace and hopefulness.