User:Ada/Projectproposal

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⊹ ࣪ ˖ what do you want to make?

A body of written work about the virtual places that internally displaced people inhabit. It will ask three main questions:

- what happens to our sense of self when different identities cannot coexist inside us?

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

- what can this way of using the internet as a sacramental space tell us?

Through these questions it will explore the relationship between online communities and spirituality, focusing on how marginalised individuals find identity and belonging in virtual spaces. To do this, I will share people's stories of fragmentation, healing and support. The stories are backed and intermezzo-ed by theories about these people, places and moments written by social scientists, physiologists and theologians. A honest, guttural and soft portrayal of an online people.

Together with the written text, I'd like to build an homage to these places. Backplace is/will be a platform grounded in compassion, care and authenticity – mirroring the very qualities that turned online communities into havens for me and countless others. It's meant as a reflection of what online spaces offer us and what they don't. Breaking it down to only the parts of a platform that theoretically aid identity development, community and support it will stand as a reminder and digital love letter.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ 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 these 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.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ how do you plan to make it?

Describe how you will go about conducting your research through reading, writing and practice. In other words, through a combination of these approaches, you will explore questions or interests you have laid out in your general introduction. In this section you can help us understand how your project will come together on a practical level and talk about possible outcome(s). Of course, the outcome(s) may change as your research evolves, but it's important at this stage to have some concrete idea of how your project could come together as a whole.

• Read the articles I collected about marginalised groups online and virtual communities.
• List all the communities, find out ways to navigate anonymity(!).
• Make a survey and share it with people who might have been/are a part of these communities.
• Interview individuals I know about their experience with VC (this involves finding people online and irl)
• Find patterns, dig through the information I have to build a thesis.
• 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).
• With this information, decide where to host my own digital safe space and what kind of platform is best suited.
• Design and program the platform, mess around and have fun with it until something happens.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ what is your timetable?

⊹ ࣪ ˖ who can help you and how? ⊹ ࣪ ˖

I hope to find 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 frameworks 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 unifying 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 a call with a switchboard operator. It connected only two computers at a time 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

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.