personal stories, corporate templates
DESCRIPTION
Presentation given at The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice, 8-10 Nov 2009, in Bergen, Norway.TRANSCRIPT
Personal Stories,
The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative
Interdisciplinary Art PracticeBergen, November 8-10, 2009
Jill Walker Rettberg, University of Bergen
Image: “iheartlatkes”, (CC) http://www.flickr.com/photos/41520827@N05/3901774629/
Corporate Templates
Literary narrative genres develop from personal narrative practices
Photo: (CC) Lenore Edmanhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/lenore-m/467996341/
Writing girls
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
Image: http://flickr.com/photos/hand-nor-glove/179558293/ by “This Year’s Love”
Personal media are the opposite of mass media.
Lüders, Marika (2008) ‘Conceptualizing Personal Media’. New Media and Society 10 (6): 683-702.
Photo: Jeff Hitchcock (“Arbron”) (CC) http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbron/65785552/
Photo from Flickr, CC by Dean Michaud (DNAMichaud)http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnamichaud/3237424855/
Today’s narrative practices are changing rapidly.
Norway: every month 60% use Facebook; nearly 10% use Twitter (http://www.slideshare.net/PetterB/foredrag-om-delingskulturen)
Miles Hochstein: A Documented Life http://www.documentedlife.com
Eleanor Antin: Carving, 1972.
Noah Kalina, 2006:
http://www.everyday.noahkalina.com/
People love it – and make their own versions
Dailybooth.com
Tehching Hsieh, 1980-1981
Thanks to Mark Jeffery for telling me about this.( )
Simple rules seem to encourage everyday creativity.
We follow cultural
templates both in living
and documenting
our lives.
(CC) Carlos Mendozahttp://www.flickr.com/photos/fotodisenocm/385028368/
Preformatted baby journals are examples of normative discursive strategies that either implicitly or explicitly structure our agencies.
Van Dijck, José (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
http://corriehaffly.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/do-it-yourself-pregnancy-and-baby-journal/
What happens when these narrative patterns aren’t hand-crafted but are automatically generated?
Image: (CC) Terren in Virginiahttp://www.flickr.com/photos/8136496@N05/2196367188/
trixietracker.com
This is the opposite of the
preformatted baby journal:
our daily (unconscious?)
patterns are visualised
Four ways social media organises representations of our lives:
Facebook Friend Visualiser (TouchGraph)
Trixietracker.com
Flickr.com Archive View
Google search history
“Countries I’ve visited”
Nike’s “Just Map It”
The World as a Blog
Manovich, Lev (2009) ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production.’ Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 319-31.
Mass cultural production follows templates set up by the professional entertainment industry. Are we even more firmly colonized by commercial media today than in the 20th century?
Image:http://www.bijt.org/wordpress/2005/11/
We’re always trapped in (and inspired by) genres, stereotypes, rituals, patterns.
What would literary narratives following these personal but computationally assisted practices look like?
A story told “in Facebook”?
Or like those marketing campaigns that uses your data through Facebook Connect?
http://www.prototype-experience.com/
Or something better.What do you think?