☽｡⟡˚ graduation research seminars ˚⟡｡☾

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// very serious project proposal

// very serious thesis outline

THREE

What do you WANT to write? [What will the text be about? (thesis). What do you want to explore?

Be clear about HOW you want to tell your story.]

Outline three key issues you want to explore.

• Please think of only 3 key issues.

I want to write about how marginalised and fragmented people go to online spaces to put themselves back together. I want to write these people's stories, what made them go look for online communities and what they got out of it. It will be both a third person omniscient narration and a first person narration, to combine academic literature analysis and personal storytelling.

⭐ intro (what is this text about)

This text explores the relationship between online communities and spirituality, focusing on how marginalised individuals find identity and belonging in virtual spaces. It discusses the fragmentation of the self that happens as a result of trauma and the healing potential of online communities. It highlights a new perspective of the role of the internet as a space for fulfilment and connection. Overall, it examines how online communities bridge the gap between individual well-being and spirituality, especially for those marginalised in their physical realities.

how: that's the hard bit for now, somehow both an academic essay and personal story-telling. the topics are a bit heavy, struggling to not burden the reader and myself while writing. the solution might be a mix of third-person omniscient & first person subjective- might either be two different voices & thus 2 people or the same voice in different versions? i don't really know examples besides a series of unfortunate events.

⭐ key issue 1 = chapter 1

fragmentation of the self as a result of trauma and marginalisation

• what happens to our sense of self when our identities cannot coexist?

⭐ key issue 2 = chapter 2

online communities as safe space to manage identities that are outside the norm

• how do alienated people find community and what are these communities like?

⭐ key issue 3 = chapter 3

• Sacramental web: a new vision of the role of the internet

• what does this way of using the internet tell us?

⭐ conclusion

The project, how can this inform the production of a community platform?

TWO (revised)

🎀 why do you want to make it?

My life story might be my own, but my feelings have not been. As thousands others have, in the darkest of times I have found sanctuary in digital spaces. Virtual communities have offered me a profound sense of belonging, understanding, and even healing. They were the first places I've found companionship and understanding and to this day remain some of the only places to be witnesses to certain aspects of me. I'm not alone. I've witnessed firsthand the incredible transformation these communities can bring, shaping identities and providing solace for those who often felt marginalised by their physical world.

In today's internet landscapes communities are rare, hard to access and built against frameworks put in place by programmers, designers and product owners. But they are there, because humans always find a way to make anti-human landscapes human-friendly, which is to say: full of care, softness and honesty. This is the only thing that matters to me.

🎀 what do you want to make?

I would like for the written component of my thesis to be a very integral part of it. I want to to share what I saw and still see, what online groups gave me and others. I want to talk about virtual spaces built by people to aid their own spiritual, social and mental wellbeing. I want to write the stories of people who had no body to tell their story to, but had a keyboard, a camera and the ability to navigate the internet. A honest, guttural and soft portrayal of an online people. I want to explain to others why this happens and why this matters.

Together with the written text, I'd like to build an homage to these places. A platform grounded in compassion, care and authenticity – mirroring the very qualities that turned online communities into havens for me and countless others.

🎀 how do you plan to make it?

1. Read the articles I collected about marginalised groups online and virtual communities.
2. List all the communities, find out ways to navigate anonymity(!).
3. Make a survey and share it with people who might have been/are a part of these communities.
4. Interview individuals I know about their experience with VC (this involves finding people online and irl)
5. Find patterns, dig through the information I have to build a thesis.
6. Navigate and note what made the platforms that hosted these communities right for doing so (Ask people in these communities what they would want from a platform in the survey).
7. With this information, decide where to host my own digital safe space and what kind of platform is best suited.
8. Design and program the platform, mess around and have fun with it until something happens.

🎀 what is your timetable?

- 25/09 = Write a message to people within my own online communities, contact people who I used to contact too.

- 26/09 = Read and summarise the articles. Bring the books home with me(oopsie)

- by first week of October = contact all the people I wanted to, write down/record interviews (so far, marta, catarina, maybe sara, quinn, twt groups i'm part of). ask around on people still active on these sites too! club penguin, tumblr, idk where else.

- by 9/10 = map out some sort of pattern of what these people enjoyed, what brought them there, general useful information.

- after 9/10 = start applying the foundational research to my prototyping process. (today: ask joseph what he thinks about if it makes sense to only start thinking about the platform once I have all the interviews or if I should already mess around with it?)

🎀 who can help you and how?

I hope to find out more people(artists, writers and coders) who work with and within online communities and deal with digital life without seeing it as a plague on human society. I think I will need the support of Joseph and Manetta with the actual functionality of the platform and with deciding what technology best supports my ideas.

🎀 relation to previous practice

This project borrows from a lot of the framework I've used before. I started my practice in the purely scientific field of communication science, but my interest in marginalised groups drove me to write my thesis about LGBTQ people and how represented they felt by mainstream media.

Once I joined XPUB, I felt a bit lost on how to connect my background in data research to art and design practices again. For my first project, I was part of the Garden Leeszaal project where I archived what people made in the workshop by scanning it and then bound it into a book. I didn't see it then, but now I know that my interest was ultimately in how people interacted with the books we provided and in recording their presence.

I felt more at home in our second project, where we made an healing toolkit. My personal interpretation of healing was Oracolotto, a deck of tarot cards based on my cultural heritage and dream interpretation. My personal conception of spirituality was and still is profoundly impacted by my own Italian esoteric heritage.

I then collaborated on a website that translated unicode into hex and emojis. It was part of a critique of unicode and an interest in symbolism and different modes of communication.

From there, I started exploring with uniting design and scientific practice by making a framework about how groups come together and apart based on research about worms. I made a website to share the principles.

My last project was a web-based video calling platform recreating the feeling of call with a switchboard operator. It connected only two people and was specifically made to contact XPUB from New York, where I was.

This project borrows from all the previous roles I've worn. It's a text based in social science, psychology and theology focusing on communication, marginalised groups and spirituality. It's an archive of interactions reflecting my own history. It's also a web platform that uses the framework I have built and focused in care and spirituality.

🎀 relation to a larger context 

The project itself sits in a massive theoretical web, building on pre-existing knowledge situating technology as being here on earth with us(nature) rather than against us. It builds on the notion shared often online that social media as we knew it is dead (rip) and wondering what could come from it. It relates to any piece of work that saw relational healing as possible, community as necessary and the really delicate matter of belonging and mutual care as the most important thing there is.

It also sits, hopefully next to or at least on the step below, art and design made by people who saw the potential for digital spirituality and how a higher power can really be anything. It meets other projects on that plane of esoteric web that one can only find by spending a long time online and by desperately needing to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, to love and be loved back.

🎀 references/bibliography

Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and selves’, Symbolic Interaction, 31(1), pp. 33–56. doi:10.1525/si.2008.31.1.33.

Berlant, L.G. (2022) On the inconvenience of other people. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bridle, J. (2023) Ways of being: animals, plants, machines: the search for a planetary intelligence. New York: Picador.

Campbell, H. (2005) ‘Considering spiritual dimensions within computer-mediated communication studies’, New Media & Society, 7(1), pp. 110–134. doi:10.1177/1461444805049147.

Chile, L.M. (2004) ‘Spirituality and community development: Exploring the link between the individual and the collective’, Community Development Journal, 39(4), pp. 318–331. doi:10.1093/cdj/bsh029.

Delgado, C. (2005) ‘A discussion of the concept of spirituality’, Nursing Science Quarterly, 18(2), pp. 157–162. doi:10.1177/0894318405274828.

Fisher, J. (2017) Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. New York, New York: Routledge.

Gonzales, A.L. (2015) ‘Disadvantaged minorities’ use of the internet to expand their social networks’, Communication Research, 44(4), pp. 467–486. doi:10.1177/0093650214565925.

Haraway, D. (1985) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review (US), pp. 209–240. doi:10.4324/9780203093917-25.

The Government Lab (2020) The power of virtual communities, The GovLab. Available at: https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/ (Accessed: 28 September 2023).

Mesch, G.S. (2011) ‘Minority status and the use of computer-mediated communication’, Communication Research, 39(3), pp. 317–337. doi:10.1177/0093650211398865.

Mowat, J.G. (2015) ‘Towards a new conceptualisation of Marginalisation’, European Educational Research Journal, 14(5), pp. 454–476. doi:10.1177/1474904115589864.

Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013) ‘Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities’, Journal of Sociology, 51(4), pp. 950–967. doi:10.1177/1440783313486220.

ONE

⭐ what? (two sentences)

a workshop (knitting circle, coven meeting, archetype excavation) to find collective digital symbols that brought us closer to others and to ourselves.

the goal is to end up with an archive of very personal symbols for our digital growth.

⭐ how? (two sentences)

i talk about what digital symbols meant to me and show examples that i printed out on little circles. People can start from those to come up with three more symbols and write them down.

We talk about it and then then find three more, then share why they helped us and how they mattered.

⭐ workflow (two or three sentences)

seek people whose personal growth was heavily influenced by the internet and who'd be willing to come to the workshop.

create a safe intimate space to meet, write and talk.

afterwards, hopefully compile a list of symbols and go from there.

⭐ timetable (Sept 23-July 24)

have the workshop on 29/09 on the full moon.

first week of october: i revise and write about the list

from then i do something different and way better and super cool that i'll dream about soon

⭐ relation to previous practice (two sentences, draw on Text on Practice)[edit | edit source]

I started the course making an archive of people's interactions at our workshop, then I made a tarot card deck based on my specific cultural symbols and archetypes and finally realised the most interesting part of it all is really just people.

I want to merge them all in this and also incorporate the nostalgia I have for early internet communities and the growth they brought me.