This portrait project was completed by Jed Smith and the excellent Graham Klyme, both of whom are somewhat compulsively addicted to online methods of social communication. Because of this interesting shared attribute, we determined to do a portrait of someone with a distinct and prevalent online identity. This approach would allow us to hopefully create a commentary on the interesting issues associated with online identity, persona, and communication.
Namely:
communicating in most forms online, such as bulletin board systems like blogs and forums, instant messaging, and personal profile pages such as myspace and facebook, are unique in that they allow or even encourage premeditated mediation of content. This is to say that one can think about what one is saying while one is saying it, and edit the result. This is not possible as much in real-time vocal conversations.
The portrayal of self online allows for very intentional representation in a manner which has the distinct possibility to be disingenuous. We were certainly interested in the implications of this possibly malicious capability.
We were also interested in the voyeuristic attributes of sites such as myspace, and suicidegirls.
Graham knew a girl named Ana who qualified perfectly for interrogating a number of these issues, and she graciously agreed to donate some of her precious time to talk to us. We ended up with an hour of interview footage, which discussed a great variety of issues and her personal experiences online. We then had to extract what we interpreted to be key phrases, telling of the issues we wanted to address, and cut it down to less than 5 minutes. This was a difficult task, and it resulted in the absolute butchering of what Ana said. We literaly cut sentences in half, pasted them together, and rearranged their order.
Possibly because of the moral ambiguity of this, we decided to employ the tactic of emphasizing our manipulative role in the creation of the video by beginning and ending with a deluge of jump-cuts. This worked very well to illuminate the constructed nature of many interview situations, which many people (myself most of all) are probably unaware of.
One Comment
This was a great video. Finally Graham and Jed. Untill I heard it, the rightness of it never occured to me…
In an unrelated matter, I really like the word Exegesis. I say it like this : I say the exuh normally then, on the g sound I move the fingers on my right hand back and forth as I make the sound chickachicka except with a g instead of a ch, then I raise the pitch of my voice alot of the g, then slightly lower it for the sis like some saying the word PARTY… So it’s more like exuh-chicka-chicha-g-sis.