Constructing an Infrastructure

Dear cyber-travelers. Since the last post, I've taken the time to leave the groundwork I laid for myself and expand into different texts, thoughts, and other works that broaden my vision of my concept. While I'm still in the middle of not only reaching inward for new stimulation but also expanding outward in the already existing landscape of cyber philosophy, and will mostly be talking about a single book and the references it provided, I'd still like to share an update of sorts. I'm at the edge of a very daunting world, even parts excited and scared to explore.

The importance of the physical

I think one of the biggest changes in my way of thinking about the themes I want to dissect regarding the audiovisual work, is the separation I saw between the real and the digital. I started out with the intention of creating some sort of immersive fount footage film that would transcend the viewer to a digital world. Seeing my own experience with the internet as "escaping from reality", I thought that the beauty and strange familiarity of online escape places originated from the detachment they had from the real world. I wanted to maybe reflect what you saw in the digital back in the physical, and that way create some sort of statement. But I think It's way more fluid than that. This is where Legacy Russel's manifesto Glitch Feminism comes into play.

She discusses her preferred use of the term AFK or 'away from keyboard' instead of IRL or 'in real life'. She introduces Nathan Jurgenson who wrote a critique of separating the digital from the physical. He makes the case that making the distinction between 'real life' and online is deeply flawed. He says that "our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities [..] but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits."

And this alters my way of thinking about online spaces. I was always going to create something that would exist in the digital, and have some kind of connection to the real world. But now I feel like the physical world plays a so much more meaningful role in portraying the digital. Both have impact, create, and influence each other. And I think therefore going forward my intentions of creating something that's somehow 'outside of this world' is not the right way to go. Creating some sort of wall between the two, or portraying it as a river; on one end the physical, the other the digital, and between it is a stream that only flows one way, is so limited. In the words of Legacy Russel: "[..] it violently forecloses worlds, rather than expands them." 

No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman (2015)

So while I still want to create a work that dissects the online space, I'm not going to view it as something that doesn't exist in the physical. And thinking about some kind of persona that inhabits these spaces, that persona can have a more explicit connection to the real world. Showing that they not only use online spaces to escape, but also create and think, and then express this in the 'real' world.

"[..] the digital skins we develop and don online, help us understand who we are with greater nuance. Thus, we use glitch as a vehicle to rethink our physical selves."

Who am I at a party?

I've always wanted to make a party scene. The moment in so many films where we see our characters break free under fluorescent light, preferably with some cheeky dance music playing. There is just nothing like a good club scene, the epitome of adolescence ecstasy. See the club scene in Burning (2018). From the very start of conceptualizing this idea, images of party lights, sweat on faces, and overly loud music were present somewhere. The direct connection was not really clear to me yet. How a party connects to the concept of digital spaces was a mystery; they both seemed polar opposites to me; one so very present in the physical world, the one space where I least expect to pick up my phone, and the other so far away from who I am at a party. Because for me personally, I do feel like I'm a completely different person at a party than when I'm in the digital world. Then I read this passage in Glitch Feminism: "The beyond is blurred, it is runny. Our blur is a dance floor at 4AM, that moment where in the crush of all-bodies lit up under strobes like firecrackers, we become no-body, and in the gorgeous crush of no-body, we become every-body. Our song is playing, now let us build a gooey world to go along with it." 

She uses this image of a party as the space where, because of ultimate freedom, we can break the world apart. And laying bare the corrupted machine, there can grow a new beginning. And this connected the dots for me. How the me that I am at a party is not at all so different from the me I am online. Both create space to be free, to reform, to express what before was unable to. But this goes further to who I am as a person. How I grew up online and found ways to learn about and express myself and my queerness. It's the first time that I've used that word in my writing here, queer, and though I wasn't shying away from it, I didn't really think it was all that important in what I am trying to make, seeing the work more as a visual and atmospheric project than a dissection of my identity as a queer person. But the internet provided space to grow, and with that, my understanding - and coming to terms with - of my sexuality did too. It is a space of no judgment, where I could do things that I would never have been able to or accepted outside of it. That's something I can incorporate into my project, even more than I was originally willing to. 

Earlier in the book Russel talks about performance artist boychild and how their work connects to nightlife. "I exist in a world that comes after the Internet," boychild says, "my adolescence was spent finding things there. The underground exists on the Internet for me." 

boychild at Rifflandia (2013)

Maybe deep down I knew that there was going to be some sort of statement on sexuality in relation to the online, and my identity in that space, but I didn't know what form it was going to take. But it was there all along, I just had to look in the direction the music was coming from. Here is my pathway to lay bare something more personal in what I'm about to make. My dream of a party scene is the answer.

Going forward

I still do not have a really clear plan on how I'm going to handle the actual creation of the audiovisual piece. Though it's still going to be a found footage film, I don't know how literally I want to take the term 'found footage'. For now, I'd like to watch, read, and reflect more on different already existing works out there. And while my vision of the themes I'm going to incorporate has grown, I'd still like to keep fairly close to the original themes I had. I am just now starting to realize how much of the world and myself is going to be in it. 

In the meantime, I've been enjoying the TikTok slideshows of pictures from old video games that have been coincidentally showing up on my page. It is part of this strain of content relating to the liminal space hype online, but of which I can't seem to get enough. The low-res graphics, abandoned spaces, and ambient music provide this all-too-familiar feeling of strange melancholy. It's fairly silly but it does give me some inspiration on the sort of atmosphere I want to create, and how memories and reminiscence of an online childhood can play a part in the creation of digital spaces.

Anyway, I will go and explore now. 

@sibwiw808 on TikTok

Legacy, R. (2020) Glitch Feminism. Londen: Verso

Perlson, H. (2014). Truth in Gender: Wu Tsang and boychild on the question of queerness. Sleek: https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/truth-in-gender-wu-tsang-and-boychild-on-the-question-of-queerness/

Jurgenson, N. (2011). Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality. The Society Pages: https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/