Last week, I listened to Emmett of ex.haust podcast chat with Mary Harrington titled “All that is culture melts into porn” (I would highly recommend it). Emmett, almost unrelated to the rest of the podcast, talks about the weight in a room of friends being heavier in knowing that everyone is connected to their smartphone. He says that the weight of possibility feels heavier and makes it so much harder to fully engage or ground. The weight of possibility here has meant many things to me – friends who hear of other plans they want to do and mobilize to that, getting difficult calls or texts while in a room and feeling dissociative, even planning for other plans with other people while with people, and more. What was a very boomer take within this episode spoke to me (smh) – but again I would recommend this podcast and it didn’t feel as boomer as it felt communal. 

For this week’s visual experiment, I took photographs of others and scenarios in the way that I sometimes do of myself – repeated without much change. I have always been curious about documentation culture and the ways that people will try to take a perfect photo. It can be so unnatural to click on your friend smiling or some food sitting in front of you 6-7 times (at least for me) but I much more often do it with my own representation. Taking these images of my friends and their surroundings with the same critique and also observing the tiny differences between representations has been…. Upsetting? I am not totally sure how it’s been relating to my practice, but I think the twisted nature of presentation of self seeping into presentation of loved ones and loved spaces can contribute to some of the work I’m interested in exploring. 

Three people who are interested in the work I am interested in: 

Default Friend

Default Friend has been pretty instrumental in my research over the last year and the way I think about digital bodies, consent, identity construction, fragmentation, and loss. Her substack has been home for a variety of thoughts I feel inspired by. While she identifies as more of a theorist than a creator, her ideas and how she presents them (and who she presents them with) has been inspiring. 

I have made it through two episodes in the last week. Both were pretty heavy listens, and I’ll start with a TW for assault/rape, death, loss, and memory. 

  1. A Rape in Cyberspace
  2. When You Die Online, You Die in Real Life 

In both, she talks about truth construction and how much of our versions of truth are rooted in the memories we recite and re-recite. What this means for assault, especially those who engage online communities around assault and pain, can lead to memory constructions that are partially rooted in truth, partially rooted in others’ truths, and partially rooted in a desire to be one with community. I really appreciated both of these episodes. 

Cyber.Doula 

I’ve talked about Olivia Ross aka @CyberDoula before. I feel moved by her work on data trauma and what it can look like to heal from said trauma. Her work is widespread between educational, creative, peer2peer, and more on what it looks like to build toolkits to protect ourselves and heal ourselves from the trauma that many spaces that are integral to our selfhood and identity construction lead to. 

Felipe De Brigard 

Felipe De Brigard was a professor of mine in undergrad, and I didn’t take his work seriously enough at the time. Since then, I’ve revisited his readings and research on the philosophy of mind, specifically confabulation and false memory planting within social situations. I want to dig deeper into his heavier neuroscience work, now that I have a stronger foundation of the theory through people like Default Friend and Olivia.