REPRESENTING THE SELF IN
THE DIGITAL AGE
HUMS 402: Selfhood, Race, Class, and Gender
Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran
A Critical and a Creative Project
1. What is the history of the contemporary ways we
represent ourselves?
2. What alternatives can we imagine to current social
media platforms?
Our Background
Blended Reality in Practice: Negatives
1. The resolution of the scanners and printers isn’t great;
students found it hard to come up with scans and prints
that they were satisfied with
2. These technical issues limited the kinds and sizes of
objects students could scan
3. Only one of their final creative projects involved the use
of an actual 3D scanner and printer: all the other
students opted for older technologies, such as audio
and film recording, photography, and text
Blended Reality in Practice: Positives
1. It encouraged creative experiments and comparisons
across media
1. It de-familiarized more established technologies, and
helped students think about their capacities and
functions with greater specificity
2. It helped students think about technology as something
they could actively critique, and not just use as passive
customers
Thinking about Blended Reality
As we look ahead to our experimental Blended Reality project in
the weeks to come, here are some ideas/forms to browse,
explore and think through.
How might you do a 'deep genealogy' of your social media
profiles: what does your Facebook profile try to express, how
does its form relate to the forms of earlier modes of selfexpression we studied in this class? Or, can you create an
alternative form of Internet presence for yourself using these
technologies, and explain your choices? What would you want
your online 'self' to be linked to, and how? What does Facebook,
Twitter, etc. not show about you that you care about, or what
forms of expression does it not allow for that you care about?
Free-Association:
What Could Blended Reality Be?
“I imagine a blended reality project as something which involves
reflection on my own life, interspersed with pieces of
text/video/image from other sources, the idea being that these
other sources would say as much as I would want to say, and
would pretty much stand alone, without analysis or explanation.
A bit like the way Montaigne uses quotations in his essays.”
“[What] the phrase calls to mind is a level of futuristic layering or
superimposition of real and digital worlds, so that they
simultaneously obstruct, confuse, and reveal each other.”
“In my mind, a blended reality is a more accurate representation
of any single thing than any individual can offer.”
“I hesitate to create because it is
impossible to fully recreate an
experience or self through any
expression, but I guess recreational
(haha) expression always at least
recreates even just the impossibility of
expression?
…
Maybe that impossibility is in itself an
essential part of the self?”
“The difficulty seems to be in the way
that the conventions of different forms
are mediated by both the forms’
inherent characteristics, as well as by
its conventions and history.”
“poetry: what ambiguity of language might [it] allow us to
express[?]
…
audio: why do many people hate the sound of their own
voice?
photography: objective? still subjective? what can be a
more accurate record of the self? who is taking the photo?”
Creative Assignments:
Grading Rubric
We are looking for three qualities/dimensions of your writing:
(i) style and rhetoric, or, how well it looks and reads (5 points)
(ii) depth of analysis, or, how much reflection and self-awareness is evident in the
response (5 points)
(iii) creativity: is it funny? unusual? surprising? (5 points)
Grades will be awarded as follows:
A
AB+
B
BC+
14-15 points
12-13 points
10-11 points
8-9 points
6-7 points
4-5 points
Blended Reality Testing
Memorabilia
My plans for scanning the pink barrette went
completely awry. The 3D scanner was
unable to recreate anything that looked even
remotely like the clip I set before it, likely
because of the clip’s reflective surface.
While it would appear to be creating a fairly
accurate copy while the scanning was in
process, when it came time to render, the
machine could not figure out how the sides,
front, or back connected. Instead, the
screen displayed a number of strange,
fragmentary pink and white splinters,
nothing that could be discerned as an image
of a barrette.
Oddly, this malfunction held more creative
potential than I thought current technology
was capable of (though I’m unsure if a
machine can be deemed “creative” as a
person might be, and I hesitate to label it as
such—it wasn’t intentional on the machine’s
part, after all). The computer’s failure to do
its job correctly forced me to think more
broadly about the function of the machine—
what does it mean, creatively, for the
machine to fail to serve its purpose and
instead generate something entirely
…it’s hard for me to
see a lot of possibility in
simply creating an accurate
model of something that you
already have in the real world
in order to make another one
with a 3d printer, but glitches
like the two-headed cow are
much more than that.
Certainly it has a close
relationship to the real object,
but the difference is key – it’s
something really new, not just
a high tech copy. What I did,
then, was to see if these kind
of glitches can be produced
intentionally. … Of course
similar things can be
accomplished with 3d
modeling software, but it’s
much easier for someone
inexperienced with that
technology to make these
changes during the scan
process.
Contingency
Final Assignment
After six weeks of further reading, how have your ideas
about your self-presentation—both actual and ideal—
changed? Which of the forms and media we have
discussed in class are most congenial to you? What
approaches to self- reflection or self-expression would you
be interested in exploring further? Ask yourself questions
such as these, and also think creatively, to come up with a
representation of yourself that you would find more
adequate or satisfying than the ones that you tend to use in
everyday life.
Stereotypes and Self-Fashioning (Summer)
[https://youtu.be/Cq-nGlKrGns]
A Personal Archive (Eve)
61 EDGEWOOD AV, APT #1
An Archive
In my work with WA MSS S-2885 in the Beinecke Rare Books and
Manuscript Library, I realized that the archive is built like a house.
Because it was acquired so recently and has only barely been
organized, the structure of drawers, cabinets, closets, desks, and so
forth has left clear traces. The sense of disorder reminds me strongly
of that in my own home: some of the patterns of adjacency are clearly
intentional – correspondence is roughly chronological, books roughly
arranged by genre – but many of them seem accidental. Slips of paper
get used as bookmarks and forgotten, receipts are crumpled into
pockets and handbags, and drawers originally meant for a particular
kind of thing become storage for countless other kinds of miscellany.
The archive implies this history.
P.11
P.24
Mindful
Design: Lola
Xuan (they/them)
While I …shied away from
pinning traits onto Xuan’s voice,
my impression of Xuan did
include the strong sense of
justice they acknowledged in
themselves. I also saw a
readiness to engage with and
shape both reality and
themselves based on an
earnest understanding of both.
They concluded their thoughts
on their moral conviction with a
reaffirmation of their fluidity,
“That’s one thing I care about
right now. Might change.”
Liz (she/her)
I drew a portrait of Liz with marker in
black and white, to reflect the logical
nature of her thoughts. I also exclusively
used contour to create the image (as
opposed to tone, etc.) to mirror Liz’s
linear thought processes and conviction
in her beliefs and values. However, I did
not use straight lines to draw Liz as I felt
curved, organic lines would be more
reflective of her energy and creativity.
…I also included minimal detail on Liz’s
sweater and the background in order to
convey this sense of being content and
confident in one’s own self, regardless
of where the rest of reality may be, for
example when Liz waited for her
family’s acceptance.
Chardonnay (she/her)
In order to convey Chardonnay’s
sense of carving herself out of her
history and out of her present
experiences, I started Chardonnay’s
portrait by coloring the whole sheet
of paper in black with charcoal. From
there I carved out her silhouette with
an eraser, with Chardonnay’s figure
emerging from the starkness and
with areas of that darkness still
present on her likeness…I used
warm and colorful tones of ink to
bring out Chardonnay’s compassion
and positive energy, but left patches
of charcoal to mark Chardonnay’s
incorporation of her past into her
present.
Blended Reality in Practice: Negatives
1. The resolution of the scanners and printers isn’t great;
students found it hard to come up with scans and prints
that they were satisfied with
2. These technical issues limited the kinds and sizes of
objects students could scan
3. Only one of their final creative projects involved the use
of an actual 3D scanner and printer: all the other
students opted for older technologies, such as audio
and film recording, photography, and text
Blended Reality in Practice: Positives
1. It encouraged creative experiments and comparisons
across media
1. It de-familiarized more established technologies, and
helped students think about their capacities and
functions with greater specificity
2. It helped students think about technology as something
they could actively critique, and not just use as passive
customers