personal identity

"My Life in Three Parts" addresses the question of how personal identity is influenced by the language of the web. Our online interactions are often circumscribed by tracking software and various social networks. As a result, our identities--how we view ourselves and how others view us--are shaped and expressed, in part, by personal browsing practices and the vocabulary associated with those practices. So what do our autobiographies look like in this new world? To answer this question, "My Life in Three Parts" ignores the conventions of traditional autobiography in favor of oblique readings of iconic visual symbols, terminology, and concepts found online within the private and social web-spaces of shopping, art, and mathematics. This work uses text, images, audio, and videos to create a synthesized narrative of the self. Nothing about personal identity is clear in this work: the life behind the story is only implied.

Author description: Written in Catalan, The Fugue Book thematizes the mutability and precarious aspects of personal identity. Using "Facebook Connect," the story draws personal information about the reader and his friends (the main characters) from Facebook itself. The work combines a variety of modes, genres, and platforms: wikis, discussion forums, erotic stories, blogs, and social media. Most texts are actual email messages, which is to say that the real email of the reader is a fundamental component of the text. The multimedia structure is very simple in that it only integrates static images, parts of speech synthesis (adapted to the reader), and text. The languages of programming are ActionScript and PHP.