User:Annalystad/textonmethod

Text on Method

I am currently working on a project exploring the concept of privacy and body. I will be discussing how privacy is broken and distributed in a society which is highly aware of privacy and the laws but yet it is broken again and again. With writing this method text I will unpack my own mind and ideas about ownership, privacy with body and how it relates to bigger social issues today. I will explore where the line between ownership and privacy crosses lines and who your body belongs to under certain situations.

In this text, I will discuss my first encounter with loss of bodily ownership and privacy, and how it has continued to affect my life for over a decade. Here, I want to point out that issues like the ones I encountered are not unique in any way and are far too common. Although, the interesting question that arises are far more important to tackle. As of now, the project is dealing with archival work, memory and control. The story of how this came to see the light of day is not special, it is one of the most common things that happens in today's photographic society – the nude selfie. This project has been an ongoing process for over a decade without me being aware of it. At the age of 13, anno 2006 - I sent a nude picture of myself to boy, and he sent one to me. I am not blaming my age, being “confused”, young and stupid. I knew what I was doing, and so did the boy. This nude picture of me spread like “wildfire” through MMS and was uploaded online. I don’t remember how I reacted, how I handled it. I don’t remember much of that year at all. Although there is one incredible strong memory of a conversation I had with my brother who was only 10 years old at the time. He came up to me and told me his friends had seen a naked picture of me and asked me if this was true, I denied it. This is the most painful memory I have. I am not asking for pity, all I want is for you to understand that I sent this picture out of pure bodily happiness and trust. I owned my body and I was proud of it, so therefore I made a conscious decision to send it to the boy who sent me one back. Equal respect and trust for one another. Sending that picture to the boy did not mean that I gave away my body, or that the boy now had ownership of it. The trust was broken, sent to someone else without my consent, although, the worst part was that my body, which I found beautiful and was proud of – became a joke, turned into a physical object that was broadcasted like football scores on the news. This is where it gets interesting, now, 11 years later – if I wanted to find that picture, use it in this project as an anchor, put it on public display it would be illegal. I took the picture, it is my own body, nothing else, yet I do not have full ownership of it or the body in it.

Currently I am in the research phase of the project, mapping out the concept and how to make a physical work. Throughout the steps, I am also reclaiming my body, photographing it and gaining control over how I use it. I am also documenting what I remember, creating a map of the gap in my memory, how I dealt with it and how it affected me. The final artwork will probably not contain any images of myself, it is only a necessary step to shift the power dynamic and ownership back to me. This idea of archival images and films taken of me and my surroundings from the year it happened and onwards is highly important to discover evidence of truth – right now I am going of off selective memory and lack of reality. This work consist of images which are set in my apartment, a place i feel comfortable and safe. These images show some of the environment but at the same time can be seen as any apartment, the environment is suggesting both a personal and non personal space. There is only used natural light from two large windows in my livingroom with white seethrough curtains which creates a softer light if needed. The images shows the flat wall, some pieces of furniture or lamps and myself. I am presented nude in this personal (non-personal) space, highlighting my body, as a process of self discovery and acceptance. Not focusing on what is pretty and what is ugly, but more of a study of myself, a study of person and space and the relationship between them. The images are in color, although slightly desaturated.

Who can help and how? How does your current work connect to previous projects you have done? In my previous work I have had a strong connection with the human body, although photographing it in a non-human manner. I created these beautiful abstract landscapes that looked more like they were from a different planet. I had this urge to make the body be beautiful, beautifying it in a way – almost making it into this object you could stare at like a fetish. I believe I have been afraid to handle the look of a real body and therefore only exposing the beauty. Now, with discovering this side of myself that I had desperately tried to forget and succeeded with it, I see a red thread throughout my art and how I now can make higher quality work based on a more intense, true, and raw emotional concept. With this project I might also make photographs with human connections in spaces without the human body in it. Ultimately this project will be about ownership, privacy and distribution - not about body.

Relation to a larger context Outline practices or ideas that go beyond the scope of your personal work. Write briefly about other projects or theoretical material which share an affinity with your project. It is simply about showing an awareness of a broader context, which you will later build upon in your project proposal and writing component in the second year (you may have covered some of this in your interview)

In the works of Hito Stayerl, a German filmmaker - she focuses on distribution and circulation of images globally. She has one film named ‘Lovely Andrea’ where she goes on a journey to find a bondadge picture taken of her twenty years ago. Our projects are similar on the surface, a search for something lost, something that has been distributed, and might be embarrassing to have people find years later, and who knows, something that might have haunted you. Although, in this film she made, she does not seem to bothered or emotional about the process. Also, after the image was found - it seemed to be anticlimactic - that might be the point as well. I think the emotional attachment was missing to make her film even more compelling. In light of this, that might actually be the concept of her film, to tell a story about a problem, which is a universal one - just to show the masses of how difficult it can be to find this one image, that seems so insignificant in the masses of other images.

With this being a big social issue, and a cliché one as well, made to make the victim feel stupid and at fault. This is not an issue of victim/wrongdoer, more an acknowledgment and statement about you as a person and your rights to privacy, ownership and how you can in some sense be in charge of your image. I am not making this project to say, hey, this is a recipe of how you can handle this type of situation and how you can move past it – it is more the voice of saying it happened, and here is what I learned from it. In light of this a quote from Barrett’s book on Kristeva comes to mind - “In a world immersed in readymade images, consumer advertising and the bureaucratised language of institutions, Kristeva’s work explains how art or aesthetic experience is one of the few means by which we can generate and access images that are linked to our vital and lived experiences and that have the capacity to engender personal, political and social renewal. For Kristeva art or aesthetic experience is a practice that constitutes both a subject (A sense of self), as well as an object that has the power to transform meaning and consciousness. She views the production of a work of art as continuous with the production of the life of the individual, as a dynamic and performative process that moves between and across embodied experience, biological processes and social and institutional discourses.” (Barrett, Introduction)

Consider the possibilities open to you and where you would take your work in the near future. In my next step I am traveling to my hometown in Norway, more specifically to my old junior high school where I attended from 2005-2008. This is where the nude image of me was spread around, and now I want to go back to the place that changed my view of life. Here I will systematically work with a set method which will be decided before hand. This set method will make the project more about the story and space rather than what I think looks good in the space. As of right now, the problem with photographing nudes inside a junior high school, is just that - it's a school. After talking with the principal at the school - a woman, she understood my project and wanted to help but needed time to discuss the issue with it being a nude shoot in a school. I am also playing around with the idea of deliberately not having the human body be so visually present in the photographs, but rather use the space and architecture to highlight the story behind - to show privacy and distribution and how it was broken within this space. Ownership and authorship both comes with big responsibilities and uncertainties. It is yours to do what you wish, although the risk is high for possible damage and unwanted situations. I want to create a photographic project exploring how one and the same object can hide and reveal at the same time. How one can be in control of some of them and yet they can take you by surprise, leaving you exposed. This project will be a photographic one, how it will come out I am not sure of yet. I am now in the process of mapping out the details, creating a strong basis for my concept, and figuring out the best way to expose it to the world. I will take this cliché of a social issue, shine light on how it has been misunderstood for so long and how it is a real problem and how one can look at it differently.

Bibliography Barrett, Kristeva Reframed 2010