Response to: “Althea Thauberger: experimentalism is dead. Long live the Internet”

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=11211421

Emily Vey Duke talks about how “[u]biquitous computing and communications technologies have reconstituted us as subjects and will continue to do so.” To speak about this, I feel compelled to relate it to my own works I have created and hope to continue creating in the near future. In the work entitled The Power of the Zen-Chi, I quite literally attempted to split my personalities into multiple on-screen personas. While hardly a work of traditional experimentalism, it does seem to fit with Vey Duke’s observations of artists “position[ing] themselves explicitly as protagonists, thereby acknowledging the reciprocity of the author/audience relationship.”

Quality of my work aside, the internet has provided me, along with countless others, the opportunity to put one’s self “out there” for the masses to view or ignore at their leisure. The nature of the internet, viral videos in particular, allows a sort of narrative freedom that is not available to most people in the realms of television and film. I don’t think about movie productions and viral video productions in the same way. Ideas that I once thought were silly for film seem oddly appropriate for the internet. In this way, I absolutely agree with Vey Duke’s ideas of the internet breaking down the conventions of traditional narratives.