I began to learn HTML near the end of college, saturated with literary theory and dizzy with excitement over the simultaneously personal and political significance of reinventing my identity to my own specifications. The experience of the self-aware artist goes beyond the act of creation to encompass a dynamic, shifting relationship with an idealized or imagined other, who will in turn experience the finished artistic work and form his or her own story arc of creation and engagement. A creator who produces an “external embodiment” of his or her own experience enters into a relationship with the audience or receptors of the finished piece, engaging with emotion, conflict, and growth to transmit a story or idea. Ongoing awareness of a potential audience and a desire to facilitate their experience through a work of art sets the act of aesthetic creation apart (Dewey, 1934). The “aesthetic experience” Dewey describes goes beyond the traditional “doing” and “undergoing” of other experiences to encompass a key element of “making.” In creating a new work, an artist participates in his or her own experience as thoughts and concepts are translated through an artistic or performative medium. Emotion, the “moving and cementing force” of an experience, knits episodes together into a coherent sequence, making sense of conflict, growth, and progression of ideas and relationships (Dewey, 1934). “Doing” and “undergoing” are paired in Dewey’s model, meaning that a true experience cannot emerge from either passive receptivity or thoughtless action without reflection. When events have run their course, an experience (as opposed to a series of episodes without long-term consequence) is identified as a story arc with beginning, middle episodes, and an endpoint that provides the basis for a retrospective summing-up. Although fictional, these characters’ experience of fleeing a physical world they found overly restrictive in favor of an unlimited, ever-changing cyber identity offered me a model for melding my own academic and artistic exploration with my evolving sense of self.Īs described by John Dewey, “an experience” can be identified as an individual’s progression from initial engagement with a series of events through “fulfillment” or closure. Identifying myself with characters like Nearly Roadkill‘s Winc or The Invisibles’ Lord Fanny, I aligned my creative practice with people who consciously molded and created futuristic digital identities as artistic and performative works. Cyberpunk stories from Caitlin Sullivan and Kate Bornstein’s Nearly Roadkill and Grant Morrison’s Invisibles series to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Samuel Delany’s 1984 Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand together created a picture of an alternate reality populated by nonchalant rebels whose every expression of self or identity was an act of performance. Shying away from labels and the political weight attached to self-identification with one identity or another, I was drawn to the linguistic ambiguity of postmodernist theorists’ and novelists’ writing. Close reading of Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter and Gender Trouble along with Roland Barthes’ writing on language and pleasure provided me with a theoretical framework to question the solidity of language and narrative structure, and by inference to consider the conundrum of whether the words we use could in fact shape our perceptions of the world (Butler, 1990).Ĭoming out as gay in college led me through an extensive personal and academic quest for identity and a stable sense of my place in the world. At the height of my ambivalence over personal identity and academic affiliation, I became fascinated with the possibilities web design and “hypertext narrative” offered for a reinvention of the self. I struggled to come to terms with my own sexual identity and place within or outside communities defined by sexual orientation, postmodernist theoretical affiliation, and college campus social patterns. In 1998, on the precipice of the 2000’s dot-com collapse, I was an English major at Brown studying language and gender in contemporary fiction. To the extent that the creation of this persona is an intentional and performative act, potential exists for an “aesthetic” experience as defined by John Dewey. The dynamic media user constructs a digital persona whose desires influence the experience of media interaction. An exploration of my/ own autobiography as told through interactions with dynamic media.
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