making lemonade
via apophenia I came across the disentanglement of the lonelygirl15 experiment …
more episodes | They are telling their story, truth or fiction. Of course, this makes many people very uncomfortable. They want blogs and YouTube and MySpace to be Real with a capital R. Or they want it to be complete play. Yet, what’s happening is both and neither. People are certainly playing but even those |
| who are creating “reality” are still engaged in an act of performance. They are writing themselves into being for others to interpret and the digital bodies that emerge often confound those who are doing the interpretation. | |
Before we dismiss this all as “postmodern”, keep in mind that the epistolary novels discussed earlier also played with our uncertainty about the line between reality and fiction within a new medium (the printed book) whose conventions had not yet been firmly established. [...] . In other words, there seems to be a fascination with blurry categories at moments of media in transition—it is one of the ways we try to apply evolving skills in a context where the categories that organize our culture are in flux.
In his interesting post where he lists different examples of invention, reaction and playful commutation occuring due a culture of rapid turnover and constant change, describing this uncertainty and unpredictability as generative. Churn encourages the experimentation and innovation at the very heart of the creative process. Not forgetting to mention that .. we should also be prepared to accept impure motives and hybrid works that emerge at the nexus between different levels of cultural production. Interestingly enough the examples he brought up, like Danger Mouse, were on a certain level already reactions themselves to a lower level of pure ‘imitating something’ (faking).
UPDATE: it might be of interest to read the comments on this NYT blog in regard of the put question for readers:
Does the revelation of Lonelygirl15’s true identity as an actress change the way you will interpret amateur video online?
... between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Heterotopias, M.Foucault, 1967)
- Permalink for
- making lemonade
- on >> mind the __ GAP* ?
- Published:
- 09.16.06 / 9pm
- Category:
- hybridity, media, network structures, perception, performativity
- Author:
- mo
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