☽｡⟡˚ graduation research seminars ˚⟡｡☾

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TWO

🎀 what do you want to make?

I want to create two interconnected components: a written piece of work and a digital platform. These elements will work in tandem, with the written piece serving as both an exploration of how online presence fosters community and aids identity formation and as a foundation upon which to construct the digital platform. The platform, in turn, will integrate the research conducted for the written text, resulting in a comprehensive framework that illuminates the transformative potential of online communities.

My primary goal is to explore the experiences of individuals in online communities across virtual worlds, forums, blog networks, and social media. I want to understand the diverse ways in which these communities are perceived, identify the various dynamics at play, and understand their influence within this context.

Specifically, I'm interested in how these communities impact personal growth and identity formation. For the first, I want to find out how digital communities have influenced and reshaped people's "self-improvement" or inner work, encompassing spiritual, social, and mental well-being. Essentially, my goal is to explore the intricate relationship between one's online presence, the formation of community, and the ongoing development of individual identity.

🎀 how do you plan to make it?

1. Collect research, define and operationalise concepts.
2. Write a new interview guide for the focus group.
3. Make a recruitment ad for the focus group.
4. Host the focus group.
5. Process data.
6. Keep writing the thesis including now my research.
7. Decide if I want to host another one depending on how well the last one went.
8. Integrate findings from the thesis in constructing what kind of platform I'd like to make.
9. Wireframe, prototype, decide hosting place.
10. Program & design the platform, test, have fun with it.

🎀 what is your timetable?

- 22/09 = deadline sharing recruitment

- 29/09 = focus group hosting

- 06/10 = deadline process the data from the group clearly.

until

- 17/11 = process and read& write, deadline thesis outline and proposal

- around this point i hope to have enough info to know what kind of platform i'd like to make.

🎀 why do you want to make it?

Throughout my life I have consistently turned to online communities when I felt too different, alone and marginalised. These experiences were unique and have helped my inner growth tremendously. I want to find out more about these experiences, how they happen and to whom. I want to aknowledge that today most popular social media are entertainment and broadcasting platforms badly set up for genuine connection with people outside your pysical social network. we can't go back. how do we go forward within a paradigm that sees technology and the more-than-human as having the potential to heal?

🎀 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.

I want to try and contact Ginevra Petrozzi too, an artist who works with v2 and has done work on holistic technology and digital esotericism. i hope to find and try to contact more people like her. I'd also like to contact later on Femke with whom we talked a lot of people and digital alternatives.

🎀 relation to previous practice

Funny how it all somehow relates back to what I've done both in the course and outside it. Feels like a natural follow-up. I went from fine-arts to quantitative social science and found peace in the defining, operationalising and framework-building of it. During the first special issue I felt lost and resorted to helping people archive their work, finding that reflecting people back to themselves was easier. In the second I felt more at ease and made a deck of oracle cards and wrote an accompanying booklet that reflected my interest in the esoteric, the subconscious and personal and cultural symbols. For the last one, I made an emoji translator then a scientific framework around how groups come together and apart and lastly a digital webcam platform to communicate with xpub back at home. Now the project finally ties on how interested I am in community and its dynamics, personal growth and scientific frameworks to art.

🎀 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 to 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

Benjamin, H.T.R. (2010) Creating church online: An ethnographic study of five internet-based Christian communities. dissertation. Durham University.

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.

Gaglio, A. (2021) The importance of online communities - how has social media revolutionised safe spaces?, TEDx Warwick. Available at: https://www.tedxwarwick.com/post/the-importance-of-online-communities-how-has-social-media-revolutionised-safe-spaces (Accessed: 21 September 2023).

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.

Hamburger, E. (2023) Social Media is doomed to die, The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/18/23672769/social-media-inevitable-death-monetization-growth-hacks (Accessed: 21 September 2023).

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.

Petrozzi, G. (2021) Digital Esoterism Or to be a Witch in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Institute of Networked Cultures. Available at: https://networkcultures.org/longform/2021/11/15/digital-esoterism-or-to-be-a-witch-in-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/ (Accessed: 19 September 2023).

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.