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this is the digital

keep scrolling to engage with multimedia content while listening to the 5 original tracks.

artist/academic statement at the bottom of this page.

enjoy.

track 1.

how do you define the digital?

“much contemporary work in cyborg theory postulates that we are all cyborgs, given our complex and bodily relationships with technology.”

-sturken and cartwright

with smartphones, technology has become a huge part of our routines, identities, and bodies. technology is our personal assistant throughout the day. it is where we construct and display our identities and connect with other people through social media. technology is so indispensable in modern life that it is almost a part of our bodies: smartwatches, smartphones, fitness bracelets… they are all attached to and inseparable from our bodies, turning us into modern day cyborgs, defined by visual culture scholars marita Sturken and lisa cartwright as “entities that are part technology and part organism” (307). we no longer have just bodies, we have digital bodies. inseparable from technology.

check out: sturken, m. & cartwright, l. "practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture." (2001). oxford university press, london.

track 2.

the digital as art

the cell phone is the person: a virtual photography exhibition.

“along with the selfie, and many other once-outlandish practices that are now central to life in 2019, paris hilton pioneered the cell-phone-as-permanent-accessory.”

from “the collected cellphones of paris hilton (2003–2010)”, originally published by thom bettridge on interview magazine and photographed by Bethany vargas.

track 3.

the ephemeral IS material.

“the cloud” lives underwater.

if we're our technology and data,

we live underwater.

check out:

starosielski, nicole, and lisa parks, editors. “fixed flow: undersea cables as media infrastructure.” signal traffic: critical studies of media infrastructures, university of illinois press, 2015, pp. 53–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt155jmd9.6.

track 4.

“voicemail.”

track 5.

“big data surveillance looks much less parsimonious than the panoptic model that has played such an important role in conceptualizing and critiquing the relationship between surveillance and power. bentham’s model was meant to leverage uncertainty in the name of efficiency—the properly functioning panopticon allowed just one supervisor to impose discipline upon the entire prison population. bentham speculated that once the system had been implemented it might continue to function even in the absence of a supervisor—with just an empty, opaque tower looming nearby to warn inmates that they might be monitored at any time. this is the logic of “dummy” speed cameras or surveillance cameras: that the spectacle of surveillance carries with it its own power. compared to this alleged model of efficiency, the big data model looks somewhat extravagant: rather than mobilizing uncertainty (as to whether one is being watched or not), it mobilizes the promise of data surfeit: that the technology is emerging to track everything about everyone at all times—and to store this data in machine-readable form.”

andrejevic, m. and k. gates. 2014. editorial. big data surveillance: introduction. surveillance & society 12(2): 190.

are we still scared of surveillance or did we just get so used tobeing watched that the only way to live with it was by embracing it?

[clicking on images will take you to their original source/form]

read: artist statement describing this project.