IDENTITY: self-perception in dynamic media
The following statement should sums up what I have been thinking so far. I still have a lot to think about and make my choices so that my idea will be more down on earth so to speak. Let me know what you think.
Abstract
Identity isn’t easily defined. However, it is determined by oneself, and who one think one is. In the analog world, our self-perceptions are affected by our daily behavior, life-long experiences, and massive flow of information. In the digital world, representations of ourselves are viewed equally by us or others through computer screen.
If experience, which is created by environmental causes as well as personal relationships, can influence one’s self-perception over time, is it possible to change one’s self-perception in a restricted area/environment over a short period of time by alternate, manipulate, or recreate such environment that one’s familiar with using dynamic media?
Areas of exploration
• What is self-perception?
• How to alternate or manipulate self-perception in dynamic media?
• What is the purpose of doing this experiement?
Motivation
I was born and spent my early childhood in China, raised in Japan as an adolescent and have been in the States since College. Hence, I am a true trilingual international mutt. My own self-identity changed through experiences and cultural environment I have been in the past. Due to cross country moves, identity is one thing I have dealt with growing up.
Being a person with multicultural backgrounds, I have always confused about my own identity. It always seemed to me that the “label” of who I was or who I was supposed to be according to my geographical birth was more important than who I was as a person.
Through out last few years studying in the States, I have met few other people who have similar background as I am and made me felt better about being myself. I wasn’t at all a rare breed after all. From being a “normal” Chinese girl, because I was majority in the given context, to minority, also because of the environment context, to an international student and now I feel much more like American Japanese/Chinese. As I grew older, self-reflection became much more personal than contextual.
Now have been studying interactive media, I wonder if it is possible to create dynamic environments using existing media to change one’s self-perception.
Contextual information
In senior year in college I have tried to see myself as an international student and compared my life changing experience with other Asian students who had similar experience as I did. (My Life in America 2006)
In the Spring semester of 2009, I was more curious about the following: a) The way one see the world could possibly change the view point of another (Filter project), b) how one’s shadow, a silhouette image, can represent one’s identity; thus it cannot be easily classified by only looking determined and thus can be manipulated (Closure project), c) the different perception of yourself and others’ perception of you with same adjective in fashion (Informational visualization with 100 objects).
I have looked at Mike Wiggins’ (DMI 2003) thesis Interactive Media and the Poetic: An Exploration into the Elements of Interactive Media and found his writing about control, participation, and observation, and intimacy very intriguing. In interactive project side, Scott Snibbe’s Falling Girl as well as Shilpa Gupta’s Shadow3 caught my eyes. The most influential piece would be Monica Bonvicini’s Don’t Miss A Sec, which is an installation of a public toilet with all-mirror walls on the street.
With above projects, I started to see the possibility of direction I will be able to take in the next year and half of my study in Dynamic Media Institute.
Monica Vicilini: Don’t Miss a Sec
Tags: identity, sepf-perception
May 10th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
nicely written … fantastic topic … i love the fact that i got to see your project work and thesis proposal come together over the last year … such a rich and exciting topic to explore with a myriad of directions to go …
an interesting social media convention to think about and look at is how the intended purpose and perception of an experience shapes our online behavior …
for instance … most of the people that i know from work have a LInkedIn and Facebook account … the identity and behavior on LI is much tighter in general than that on The FB … just the information and presentation of that information starts to set up expectations for each experience and modus operandi per behavioral approach on each site … also, depending on the crowd, there might be a different approach to social media site usage … musicians that i know use the MySpace platform in a more flavorful way than one might approach a Facebook or LinkedIn profile building exercise …
a big, disturbing question that Judith Donath’s work brought up for me this semester is :
am i my tweets?
phrased differently …
am i my data?
does [ lou = data lou ]? … or does [ lou = lou ]? … or does [ lou = data lou + real lou ]? … or does [ lou = data lou + ( lou's friends' data * SMN site participation ) - ( no previous data goes away ) + 3 ]?
when did the person to data switch flip?
anyhow, fantastic summary for your thesis and project work Kat! have a nice nite …