Please Hold

Please Hold is my Capstone project for my Bachelor of Arts majoring in Creative Technologies, a culmination of work in CTCH 498 ("From Prototype to Portfolio") and CTCH 499 ("CTCH Capstone Project"). We designed and iterated on a project exploring a research question that was meaningful to us and engaged with the critical theory we'd learned about throughout our degrees.

My research question was as follows: "How can I find comfort and release and confront my fear of loneliness and change, by using my creative technologies skills to grant precious memories (of communities that felt like home) a kind of digital immortality—that transcends the linear march of time and my human brain’s fallibility—in my artwork?"

Ultimately, our goal was to use our interdisciplinary art-making skills to explore these questions through our creation as we brought our projects to life. As a creative technologist, I am a proud hybrid of a graphic designer, digital illustrator, interactive storyteller, and more, and I combined these skills to create the digital experience that became Please Hold.

My full artist statement for the final piece is as follows: "The linear march of time cannot be stopped, no matter how desperately we wish to stall it to preserve joyful memories. Time passing has forced me to leave behind many communities I loved, and now I fear the inescapable loneliness change brings me. Nearing graduation, I’ll face this again leaving my Creative Technologies community as we pursue our individual futures. Knowing my brain won’t flawlessly preserve my memories, I used my interdisciplinary skills in digital drawing, collage, graphic design, and storytelling to create a narrative-driven web-based scrapbook that immortalises this community and what it meant to me. My poetic narration and how I conceptualise time in this work draws inspiration from Jeanette Winterson’s Weight. My title, Please Hold, speaks to time and distance evoking phone calls, but most importantly, it’s an invitation. Help me hold these memories outside of time—they achieve immortality though every heart they touch."

This project was exhibited at the 2026 Creative Technologies showcase at the University of Regina on April 9th, along with my eleven Capstone peers' projects, and a variety of CTCH work across classes from the Fall 2025 and Winter 2026 semesters.

The full project can be accessed at: https://cjerry.wixstudio.com/please-hold .