Public Intimacy
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Unsitely Aesthetics: the Reconfiguring of Public Space in Electronic Art
Presentation Title:
- Public Intimacy
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: Unsitely Aesthetics: the Reconfiguring of Public Space in Electronic Art
Increasingly our experiences of public space include private expressions, personal emotions and intimate secrets: the strict divide between interior life and the outside world has dramatically shifted, leading to a new notion of public intimacy. To be involved in each other’s lives has taken on new dimensions as networked culture delivers home life to distant geographies and personal messages to numerous points of open contact. Exploring the theme of public intimacy my presentation maps out this new understanding of community and publicness by considering digital exchange as a gift-economy. While the internet and networked economies have certainly spawned an array of new forms of consumerism based entirely on money and credit, it has also introduced forms of communication, sharing, exchange and collaboration that might be viewed as supplemental, that is, as an additional formation of economy in which to be on-line is to give and receive. Such a perspective may be found through a number of artistic works. For instance in Christin Lahr’s Macht Geschenke work, a daily project of transferring one cent through on-line banking to the country of Germany along with a quote from Das Kapital, or Seppuko.com, a site that supports individuals to commit facebook suicide, the economy of being on-line can be traced through aspects of excess, expenditure, sacrifice, and generosity. Following such works, the internet will be underscored as a performative identification with others that creates unsteady forms of intimacy equally inspiring for imagining new forms of alliance, friendship, and sharing as well as artistic intervention.
