User:Laura Macchini/notes/Graduation Proposal beta

Graduation Proposal BETA

Context

Vitangelo Moscarda is the protagonist of 'One, No one and One Hundred Thousand', a novel by Luigi Pirandello; his story begins when one morning he wakes up and his wife points out that his nose bends a little to the right. Mr Moscarda comes to realize that the image that he has of himself does not corresponds to what other people see of him, that he has no control over how others see him: he freaks out. The only way to regain control is to completely destroy his personality and carefully build one that suits his liking. Inspired by Pirandello's story I started comparing Moscarda's crave for the perfect identity to our contemporary obsession for 'control over what we share'. The analogy seemed obvious. I'd like to research the topic of the 'Revision of Identity': the constant editing of our online profiles in order to perform every day our Best Self.

Inspiration/Related Projects

Listening Post(2001) Mark Hansen & Ben Rubin

Listening post is an Installation that selects fragments of texts from online conversations and displays them on a grid of hundreds of small screens; a text-to-speech synthetizer reads them aloud. From chat rooms, bullettin boards and forums, the texts are disconnected from their natural on-screen medium; the simultaneous display of all these statements and experiences gives a sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the real-time communication.

Match of the Day(2004) Geert Mul

An image-recognition software, every day, takes stills from international satellite television channels; the Artist selects one pair per day, from the images the software deemed similar, and shows them on the website of the project.

I Love Alaska(2006) Lernert Engelberts & Sander Plug

In august 2006 three months wort of search queries of 650,000 AOL users were leaked on the internet. The artists chose to tell the story of user #711391, a middle-aged woman from Texas looking online for answers to her problems, dreaming of a new life in Alaska.

Methodology

What I find fascinating about these projects is that they all use preexistent data, that being text or software-generated information, but there is clearly editorial minds behind it, and that generates an meaningful output. Given a set of data, the hand of the artist is necessary to make the connections that the machine can't see, may it be the order in which snippets of text are displayed or the juxtaposition of images and sound. Needless to say, I would like to work in a similar way.

Relation to previous practice

In my previous practice I've been fascinated by the role of the community in everyday online interactions: the community as a support for possible political change, or communities that unite people with similar interests. My previous project "Tumblrsaurus" had to do with a very specific fascination about images and communication through images: not only the images one shares are interesting because of the connections between them (the way one puts together a collection), I was also interested in examining similar collections inside the community. The focus in my fascination lies in the distance between what software thinks it's similar, and what does a user think it's a nice addition to his collection; in other words: How much of that process can be automated?

Online Performance and Storytelling

Observing the way people perform online, I came across the idea of building a narrative out of their experiences, both with automation tools, such as language processing or image comparison, and with my personal mediation. I have always been an avid fiction reader, and from time to time fiction writer, I like the idea of playing with the possibilities that software and code offer in the construction of a story, whose themes would be, ideally, the performance of appearances and the yearning for a new life.

Biblio/Videography

• Luigi Pirandello - One, No one and One Hundred Thousand
• Luigi Pirandello - The Late Mattia Pascal
• Alfred Hitchcock - North by Northwest
• Tom Mc Carthy - Remainder
• Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin - Listening Post
• Kim ki Duk - Time
• Geert Mul - Match of the Day
• Lernert & Sander - I Love Alaska
• Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
• We Live in Public (movie)
• Laurie Ouellette & James Hay - Better Living through Reality TV