Public (E-Journal, York University)

Jensen, Derrick

English

Civilization: Ongoing Holocausts

Bassi, P.K.

Mr. Gupta and the Madam From Canada

Keyman, E. Fuat

Revisiting Critical Theory in the Post-September 11 World: Identity, Security and Democratic Governance

Contributors
P.K. Bassi is an emerging writer based in Toronto.
Jane Boulden holds a Canada Research Chair in Inter-
national Relations and Security Studies at the Royal
Military College of Canada. From August 2000 until
December 2003, she was a MacArthur Research Fellow
at the Centre for International Studies, University of
Oxford. Her recent books include: Terrorism and the UN·
Before and After September 11 th, co-edited with Thomas
G. Weiss (Indiana University Press, 2004); Dealing with
Conflict in Africa: the United Nations and Regional
Organizations (Palgrave, 2003); and Peace Enforcement
(Praeger,2001).
Arthur Brown has spent the last seven years teaching
overseas, mostly in the Islamic world. He has published
several articles, organized a number of workshops, arid
kept an extensive journal on life in the Middle East that
especially covers the time he spent in Gaza. Some of
this' can be viewed at gazadiaries.blogspot.com. He is
currently working on two novels, one of which focuses
. on the history ofD.S. foreign policy in the 20th Century,
and another that looks at life in the Middle East. He is
also at work on a series of articles and essays, with an
extensive section on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. He
lives in Cairo, Egypt.
Stan Denniston, a Toronto-based photo/video artist,
has exhibited his work across Canada and internation-
ally. His most recent exhibition of large-scale B & W
photo works, just until, appeared at the Olga Korper
Gallery in May 2007. The frame-stills included in this
issue are from a group of video works called, stills, part of
an ongoing video project: no-mo video.
Kenneth Hayes is an architectural historian who prac-
tices as a curator and critic of contemporary art. He has
taught at the University of Waterloo, University of
Toronto and Dalhousie University. From 1989-94, he
and Barry Isenor published Splinter, a small magazine
about architectural culture. He has curated exhibitions
for the S.L Simpson Gallery, the Eric Arthur Gallery,
140
and Prefix ICA, and has written articles for C, Fuse,
Canadian Architect, Architecture and Ideas, On-site
Review, Praxis, Canadian Art, and Prefix Photo Journal,
and catalogue essays for York University Art Gallery and
Agnes Etherington Gallery. Hayes is presently a doctoral
candidate in Architectural History at Middle East
Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.
Derrick J ensen, a longtime grassroots activist, is the
author of many books including A Language Older Than
Words, The Culture ofMake Believe, Endgame, and most
recently Thought to Exist in the Wild. His website is
www.derrickjensen.org
E. Fuat Keyman is professor of International Relations
at Ko~ University/Istanbul. He is also the director of the
Ko~ University Center for Research on Globalization
and Democratic Governance (GLODEM) and serves as
a member of the coordination committee of the Center
for Research on Economy and Foreign Policy (EDAM).
He works on democratization, globalization, interna-
tional relations, civil society, Turkish politics, Turkish
Foreign Policy and Turkey-EU relations and has pro-
duced many books and articles, both in English and in
Turkish. Among his books are: Remaking Turkey: Global-
ization, Alternative Modernities and Democry (Oxford,
forthcoming); Citizenship in a Global World: European
Questions and Turkish Experiences (Routledge, 2005);
Globalization, State, IdentitylDiffirence: Towards a Critical
Social Theory of International Relations (Humanities
Press, 1997); Changing World, Tranforming Turkey (Bilgi
University Publications, 2005); State Problem in Turkey
(Bilgi University Publications, 2007); and Turkey and
Radical Democracy (Alfa, 2001).
John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist and writes regularly
about urban issues for The Globe and Mail, Toronto Life,
and Spacing Magazine. He is the author of The New
City: How the Crisis in Canada's Large Urban Centres is
Re-Shaping the Nation (Penguin, 2006), and contributed
to uTOpia: TovJards a New Toronto (Coach House, 2005).
to
Riley Olstead is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at
Trent University. Her research uses film, photography,
music, architecture and aesthetics to understand the
phenomenology of panic and fear in urban settings.
Paulette Phillips' film installations project uncanny
experiences that amplifY our attachments to voyeuristic
pleasure. Her work is represented by Danielle Arnaud
contemporary art, London, and also Diaz Contemporary
Art, Toronto. Phillips lives in Toronto and teaches at the
Ontario College of Art and Design.
Sherene Razack is a professor of Sociology and Equity
Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research'
and teaching interests lie in the area of race and gender
issues in the law. Her courses include: Race, Space and
Citizenship; Race and Knowledge Production; and
Racial Violence and the Law. Her forthcoming book is
entitled Casting Out: The Eviction ofMuslims From West-
. ern Law and Politics (University of Toronto Press). She
has also published: Dark Threats and White Knights: The
Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism
(University of Toronto ·Press, 2004); an edited collection
entitled Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping A White
Settler Society (Between the Lines, 2002); Looking White
People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Court-
rooms and Classrooms (University ofToronto Press, 1998,
1999,2000); and Canadian Feminism and the Law: The
Women's Legal and Education Fund and the Pursuit of
Equality (Second Story Press, 1991).
Deborah Root is a Toronto-based writer, and the author
of Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodi-
jication ofDifference.
Boja Vasic is a Toronto-based filmmaker, media artist
and photographer. He has shown his work in Canada
and in international exhibitions and festivals including
the 8th Havana Biennial in Cuba, VI Yugoslav Biennial of
Youth in Vrsac, Serbia, XIII International Art Biennial of
Vila Nova de Cerveira in Portugal, Third Tirana Biennial
in Albania, and at the Independents Biennial Liverpool.
His films and videos have been broadcast on BRAVO
and TVO. Vasic has won several awards, including the
Chris Award at the Columbus International Film and
Video Festival, the Bronze Medal at New York Festivals,
and the Gold Award at Dallas HeSCA Media Festival.
Kathryn Waiter is a visual artist based in Toronto who
works with a range of media, sites and forms of presenta-
tion to explore the intersection between art and material
culture.
Frank Woodbury is from Winnipeg. In 1941, he joined
the Royal Canadian Air Force and salvage crew as an
aircraft mechanic. In the 1950s, he moved to Brockville
where he practiced as an optometrist for over 40 years ..
He currently lives in the country near Athens, Ontario.
Greg Woodbury has worked in the Media Arts commu-
nity in Toronto for over twenty years as an administrator,
an educator, a technician, a producer, and as an artist.
He currently co-directs Charles Street Video and teaches
at the Ontario College of Art and Design. His work is
primarily based in collaborative practices.
The YWF-KIDO Foundation is a non-profit, non-
governmental organization with a mission to preserve
the natural ecosystems, arts, and heritage, and encourage
sustainable development of the Southern Grenadines
through environmental education, social development,
scientific research, and eco-tourism. The Foundation
supports the KIDO Environmental Research Station
located on Carriacou Island, part of the tri-island n~tion
of Grenada, West Indies - an area considered to be one
of the most biodiverse in the Caribbean. For more infor-
mation, see the KIDO website: kido.optsoftware.com
141
..


Contributors

Hayes, Kenneth

Austerity Measures

Brown, Arthur

Gazadiaries@blogspot.com

, YWF-KIDO Foundation

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[YWF-KIDO FOUNDATION 1
Sea Turtles
Leatherback Sea Turtles
The main procedure for evaluating the status of sea turtles is through surveys of reproduction
activity at nesting beaches. Decline in nesting has been documented to be much greater than
80% in most of the populations of the Pacific, which has been considered the species' major
stronghold. In other areas of its range, the observed declines are not as severe, with some
populations showing trends towards increasing or stable nesting activity. Analysis of published
estimates of global population sizes (Pritchard, 1982, Spotila et al., 1996), suggest a reduction
of over 70% for the global population of adult females in less than one generation. The
populations in the Pacific Ocean, the species' stronghold until recently, have declined drastically
in the last decade, with current annual nesting female mortalities estimated at around 30%
(Sarti et al., 1996, Spotila et al., 2000). In some areas, formerly abundant rookeries have
almost disappeared. For the Atlantic Ocean, the available information demonstrates that the
largest population is in the French Guyana but the trends there are unclear. Some of the
Caribbean nesting populations appear to be increasing, but their sizes are very small when
compared to those that nested in the Pacific coasts less than 10 years ago.
[INTERNATIONAL UNION FOR CONSERVATION OF NATURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES (WCN)
RED LIST OF THREATENED SPECIES]
The leatherback turtle has survived for more than a hundred million years, but is now facing
extinction. Recent estimates of numbers show that this species is declining precipitously
throughout its range, particularly in the Pacific over the last twenty years: as few as 2,300 adult
females now remain, making the Pacific leatherback the world's most endangered marine
turtle population.
Although Atlantic populations are rather more stable, models predict that they, too, will
decline due to the large numbers of adults being killed accidentally by fishing fleets. In the
Atlantic, the fact that they are widely distributed during the migration process and that they do
not dive very deep increase the risk of interaction ofleatherback turtles with long-line fisheries .
[WORLD WILDLIFE FUND]
125
Why is this species important?
As a major jellyfish predator, the leatherback turtle provides natural ecological control of
jellyfish populations. Overabundance of jellyfish may reduce fish populations as jellyfish
can feed on fish larvae and reduce population growth of commercially important fish. Hence, .
the presence of leatherback turtles benefits fish, fisheries, and people.
[WORLD WILDLIFE FUND]
Hawksbi 11 Sea Tu rtles
There has. been an 80% reduction of the global population in the last 3 generations.
[IVCN RED LIST OF THREATENED SPECIES]
Like other marine turtles, hawksbills are threatened by the loss of nesting and feeding
habitats, excessive egg-collection, fishery-related mortality, pollution, and coastal development.
Despite their protection under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), as well as under many national laws, there is still a dis-
turbingly large amount of trade in hawksbills products, and this probably constitutes the
major threat to the species.
[WORLD WILDLIFE FUND]
Why is this species important?
Hawksbill turtles also feed on invertebrates, with a predilection for sponges. When they dislodge
pieces from the surface of the coral, this [sic] provides access to opportunistic reef fish to feed.
[WORLD WILDLIFE FUND]
Green Sea Turtles
Analysis of historic and recent published accounts indicate extensive subpopulation declines
in all major ocean basins over the last three generations as a result of over exploitation of eggs
and adult females at nesting beaches, juveniles and adults in foraging areas, and, to a lesser
extent, incidental mortality relating to marine fisheries and degradation of marine and nesting
habits. Analyses of subpopulation changes at 32 Index Sites distributed globally show a 48%
to 67% decline in the number of mature females nesting annually over the last 3 generations.
[mcN RED LIST OF THREATENED SPECIES]
126
This species is widely distributed in tropical and subtropical waters, but is under threat
everywhere from over-harvesting of both eggs and adults, and from accidental mortality in
the nets and long-lines of fishing fleets.
Equally as worrying are the high numbers, in some areas, of green turtles suffering from
debilitating and potentially lethal tumours. The cause of these tumours is unknown but there
is suspicion that increasing chemical pollution levels might make turtles more vulnerable.
Green turtles are widely harvested for meat in many countries.
[WORLD WILDLIFE FUND]
Why is this species important?
Marine turtles fulfil [sic] important roles in marine ecosystems. Seagrasses and algae are
the green turtles' preferred snacks, and also happen to be amongst the most productive
ecosystems on the planet. Green turtles both help to maintain the seagrass beds and make
them more productive. Without grazing by green turtles, the seagrass blades grow tall and
get choked by sediments that obscure the light and promote disease.
Additionally, seagrass consumed by green turtles is quickly digested and becomes available
as recycled nutrients to the many species of plants and animals that live in the seagrass
ecosystem. Seagrass beds also function as nurseries for several species of invertebrates and
fish, many of which are of considerable value to commercial fisheries and therefore important
to human food security.
[WORLD WILDLIFE FUND]
127
YWF-KIDO FOUNDATION
is a non-profit corporation (NGO) registered in Grenada, West Indies.
Our Mission
Working in partnership with local communities, youth groups and CBOs (Community Based
Organizations), we seek to establish the vital links between social and economic development
and environmental protection. We are working towards a balance in human resource develop-
ment, community empowerment, environmental preservation and biodiversity conservation,
through education, training, and conservation activities.
Ou r Activities
1. Sea Turtle (Leatherbacks and Hawksbills) Nesting and Hatching, Monitoring and
Tagging Program: protecting nesting mothers, their nests, and their eggs from
unsustainable practices such as poaching and data collection (WIDECAST: Wider
Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network; UWI: The University of the West
Indies; TNC: The Nature Conservancy).
2. Sea Turtle (Hawksbills, Loggerheads and Greens) In-Water Rescue/Tagging/Release
Program: data collection (WIDECASTj UWI).
3. Restoration and conservation of threatened coastal habitats in Carriacou through the
planting of mangroves in selected sites (UNDP: United Nations Development Programmej
GEF's SGP: Global Environmental Facility's Small Grants Programme).
4. Training oflocal persons in nesting sea turtle monitoring activities and mangrove protection/
restoration techniques (WIDECAST; UNDP; GEF's; SGP; TNC).
5. Primary and secondary schools sessions, including field trips and video projections on
sea turtle and whale conservation awareness, the importance of protecting mangroves,
and biodiversity in the local ecosystems in the context of global environmental problems.
We also focus on personal development (UNDP; GEF's SGP; WSPA: World Society for
the Protection of Animals; IFAW: International Fund for Animal Welfare).
6. Summer camps for local children aged 10-14 focused on sea turtle and whale conservation
awareness, the importance of protecting mangroves, biodiversity in the local ecosystems,
and personal development (UNDPj GEF's SGPj British High Commission; IFAW).
128
7. Community meetings and happenings (such as Whale Awareness Days), including video
projections on sea turtle and whale conservation awareness, the importance of protecting
mangroves, and biodiversity in the local ecosystems (UNDPj GEF's SGPj WSPAj IFAW).
8. Production of radio eco-ads, Public Service Announcements, and songs on sea turtles,
mangroves, beaches, biodiversity and whales, read and sung by local children (UNDP;
GEF's SGPj WSPA). See: www.scriptflip.com/podcasts/whales.html
9. Puppet theater original productions (including stage construction, puppet making, script
writing on environmental and social issues, building portable frames, and a mini puppet
theatre for children, with children's participation) and original KIDO Eco-Cartoons.
10. Promotion of community-based ecotourism initiatives such as mangrove tours and
observation of sea turtle nesting activities, and the formation of Nature Trails and
interpretive sites, booths, and panels (ECCEA: Eastern Caribbean Coalition for
Environmental Awarenessj EU: European Union).
129


Sea Turtles

LaFontaine, Jennifer

There Are Stories...
JENNIFER LAFONTAINE
PUBLIC 34
D: \personal
When your dad was almost 80 years old, he began to tell a story he kept quiet your whole
life.Joseph LaFontaine was Mhis, andyou were part ifa culture, a history, an identity, that
you never really understood.
These are the opening words of my digital story, a four-minute video that
includes music, images, and most importantly, my voice telling my story. These
words are the essence of a story that I have been creating for years: a memory of
my grandfather, father and me. Like my father, I did not grow up with Metis
culture, history, or identity. It was not a part of my life, except that I grew up with
the part of the story where my father learned he is Metis.
On a family trip to Saskatchewan after my grandmother's death, I demanded
that we go out of our way to visit Duck Lake, my grandfather's hometown. I needed
to be in the place where my grandfather grew up to see what I could find. We
visited Batoche, a historic site that commemorates the late-1800's Metis rebellions
and Louis Riel's last stand in 1885. We found a cemetery filled with LaFontaines
who had lived in Duck Lake and fought in those rebellions. Here, Gabriel Dumont
was no longer a historic figure-Riel's general and commander of forces-but my
great-uncle, who lived and fought on the ground upon which I was walking. This
is the moment when my father's story of learning his identity finally made sense,
and when I started creating art about it.
My father's "finding out" story has opened up many strong desires in me. I
want to know this culture, identity, and history, and my connection to it. I want
to know why we choose not to tell stories, and understand the hardships that force
these silences. I want to reclaim these stories, honour them, and pass them on. I
want to know what right I have to reclaim them when it feels so far removed from
my day-to-day life. I want to know who I am, and what parts my grandfather and
father play in my stories. These questions feel like they have no answers. As an
artist, they are also the questions that push me to create.
"Reclaiming our voices through digital storytelling is not just about telling our stories, it is about
reclaimina our diBnity, our communities and our histories."
- Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Third World Majority, October 2004
I first discovered digital storytelling a couple of years ago while collaborating
with media artist Camille Turner and working with a group of women on a
community art project called The Story Project. We told our stories in sharing
circles and created media to share those stories: black-and-white photography,
digital video, sound, and web. I found this an exciting mix of media; it created a
multilayered approach to the telling of our stories. It wasn't a linear experience,
but a circular, sensory experience of stories.
Turner and I share a similar belief in the power of media to engage com-
munities. As she explains:
77
I use technology as a tool for art-making for a variety of reasons. Communication
technology is becoming seamlessly integrated into the fabric of our daily lives. It is seductive
and infiltrates our public spaces, our homes and workplaces. It shapes who we are and
what we think we know about each other. It's interesting to see who is represented by this
media, by whom and for what purpose. I'm really interested in harnessing its power and
at the same time, critiquing it. My mission is to tell my story using digital media and to
empower others to be able to tell their stories.
Turner and I were committed to continue our work together, and although
the organic process of our last project excited us, we found ourselves searching
for a methodology we could follow. Then we found the Center for Digital
Storytelling. We were inspired by the combination of personal narrative and
media, and thought it could be a strong fit with our vision and skills. I originally
took a digital storytelling course in order to continue our community media
projects; I gained not only a new teaching methodology, but a new way to look
at my own story.
Fire scars tell the stories iftheforest. ifwe look closely, we can recover those stories}Tom
the tree-rings. However, in the wake ifa massiveforest fire, everything is lost.
I came to the digital storytelling course with a book that I had made called
Fire Scars. It was a collection of photo-lithographs and stories from my father about
my grandfather. More broadly, it explored the idea of how we tell and don't tell
stories, and how sometimes we can find them and sometimes we cannot. I connected
this concept metaphorically to a massive forest fire in Kelowna, British Columbia,
where I grew up. I was interested in how people, like trees, hold on to stories.
Up until this point, my story was protected by metaphors and images that can
be interpreted in many different ways. My art-making allowed me to explore this
personal story with a more removed style. I was the artist telling my grandfather's
story. The story became more and more sparse as I continued to create new art
pieces. I selected single images from my book and small phrases that would hint at
the story, to raise questions and leave room for the viewer's own interpretations.
78 PUBLIC 34
D: \personal
I call you.from Toronto, prying long distance stories.from you, wanting more than you
can give. l.feel anger at the injustices that silenced my grane!father, and pride in the resist-
ance ifour ancestors.
When I began writing for the digital story, I realized how different it was to
share a personal narrative. Digital storytelling has a particular formula: tell your
story, but make it quick because you only have three to five minutes. Once you
find the essence of your story, your audience will feel your emotion and connect
to it. How then, would I take my years of art-making and distill them into one
three-minute video? Using new media to create my digital story meant I needed
to find a new slant.
That new slant was difficult because it meant that I needed to bring myse!finto
the story. It was my voice telling my story, and that was a vulnerable place. It held
an emotional rawness once the layers were stripped away. Digital storytelling
forced me to understand that I am the main character in my own story. I am able
to share my life through the stories of my father and grandfather.
There are stories that we can searchfor andfind. There are stories that are goneforever.
There are stories that we rebuild with thefragments.
Part of understanding my own identity is to carry on the stories of my father
and grandfather, and make them a part of me. I am the one in my family who asks
questions. I am the one in my family who is the storyteller. My digital story is a
tool for my storytelling to continue, as I share the video with my father, my family,
and my friends. I also know that others will connect with its emotion and themes.
As I share my digital story at screenings, on the Internet, and in publications, I
know that others are searching for their own stories, too.
When I think about all the questions that drive my current art practice, digital
storytelling plays an important role in its evolution. It has enabled me to bring my
story to a core feeling that has been there all along. This part of my identity is only
one aspect of who I am, but this process has enabled me to deepen the exploration.
I am starting to broaden the scope, bring in more aspects of my own identity, and
ask more questions. I am ready to tell more stories.
79


There are Stories...

Introduction
CHLOE BRUSHWOOD-ROSE + CAITLIN FISHER
PUBLIC 34
D: \personal
The computer as confessional, storytelling machine.
This issue of PUBLIC explores the nature of the "personal," broadly defined,
as a contemporary cultural form in relation to technologically mediated practices.
We see this issue as a response to the multiple and varied new storytelling practices
that have emerged through the use of new digital media by both avant-garde artists
and ordinary people. Here, the personal takes many forms-memory, memoir,
story, auto/biography, memento, character identification and confession, blog,
even the arguably de-personalized practices of story aggregation and database.
The digital mediation of contemporary practices has been accompanied by
the emergence of increasingly confessional texts and objects, often autobiographical.
Likewise, many new media experiences, such as hypertext and digital games, are
formally defined by the centrality of a "first-person" point of view.! And this
proliferation of "personal" expression and autobiographical practices in the context
of Widespread technologization, apparent to both new media theorists and everyday
users-witness the overwhelming numbers and variety of personal websites,
hypertexts, weblogs, and other internet-based memoirs-is perhaps not so
surprising. The turn to confession may be a necessary strategy in order to bridge
the divide between media and materiality. Katherine Hayles2 identifies the
impulse to assert the details of a material, subjective, and lived life as an antidote
to media that constitute a largely ephemeral, visual digital culture. What Hayles
describes can be seen in populist, community-based media practices like digital
storytelling, which aims to "re-storify" a culture dominated by consumer media.
Some of the pieces you'll find here-by Camille Turner, Jennifer LaFontaine and
the women of The Story Project in downtown Toronto-have been inspired by
the digital storytelling movement pioneered by Joe Lambert and the Center for
Digital Storytelling in California. They share its aesthetics and politic, but represent,
too, a new chapter in a long, rich history of do-it-yourself storytelling with any
new tools that become widely and cheaply available-think Super 8-as well as
being suggestive of new distribution strategies now possible for these kinds of
works that were unthinkable even five years ago-think YouTube and Revver.
Other pieces presented in this issue also concretize this autobiographical turn
outward into digital spaces, a small part of a huge movement of people learning
to tell intimate, private stories and sharing them with the world online-Rebecca
Rouse's reimagining and digital circulation of a life told through thrift store
ephemera; the early email message 'written by Michael Current about the/his
body in relation to email text that is circulated online every year to mark his
untimely passing; Caitlin Fisher's meditation on the poetics of writing an early,
classic confessional hypertext and her new interactive Korsakow film, 360°, at
once confessional story and database.
At the same time, technology is allowing for the increasing proliferation of
stories that are decidedly de-personal, even anti-personal-viral archives, algo-
rithmic narrative generators, the practice of plundering of the flickrverse in order
7
to make larger social stories and images. Teng & Shen's "Your Memory,
Connected" weaves together personal photos, tagged folksonomically to produce
a composite image. Jason Salavon's "Class of ... " photo series layers individual
photos in Photoshop to produce a palimpsest representing two generations of
graduating high school seniors~his mother's cohort and his own~in a single
social portrait. This kind ofwork is as much about the collective story, the aggregate,
as the individual. But so, too, might be the work of the blogger, confessional or
otherwise: Ben Hoh's essay speaks to the immediacy and power of blogging the
personal in the context of a wider, social, trauma. Both the depersonalization of
exceedingly personal artifacts and the personal narrativization of global crisis
succeed in bringing a highly subjective, idiosyncratic life to us through the
machine, at the same time pointing toward a renewed tension between private and
public in the context of digital technologies.
This tension is heightened in the aggressive compliance art of Hasan Elahi,
whose story is told through an ever-expanding online archive that details, via GPS,
his every movement through space. Elahi exploits the co-constitutive nature of
database and narrative in this emerging area of contemporary practice~think
bio-blogs and Lifelogs~andpoints toward a technological time in which auto-
biography itself, that fallible, self-reflective practice, is challenged by the possibility,
mostly now realized, of a digitized archive of our lives consisting of absolutely
everything recordable, a black box available (to anyone?) with 24/7 playback, a
pinnacle of both surveillance and the confessional.
In the end, we selected work that both theorizes and performs varied practices
of the personal as they emerge through digital technologies. We chose pieces that
ask us to both step back from and step into these stories and digital intimacies.
Chloe Brushwood-Rose writes about biographic meta-theory~thestories people
tell about their relationships with their machines, and Joyce Goggin writes on
biographic meta-fiction~the life story of an online game character. We chose
pieces suggestive of stories at the interior~amagical storytelling dress by Xiao Li
Tan that allows the wearer to inhabit the storyspace and which shares small,
autobiographical video tales of the creator's childhood memories of China, and
MASTABA, a digital family shrine, an inhabitable and singularly beautiful physical
space as well as a provocative digital archiving machine that serves as a catalyst for
oral-history-telling among a family's multiple generations. In another movement
outward, Helen Papagiannis' augmented reality handhelds make the viewer feel
like she is cupping a world in her palm, charged with the responsibility of cradling
another person's memory, making the ephemeral tangible.
Like much of the work shown here, Sascha Pohflepp's "Buttons: A Blind
Camera" urges us to ask where personal memories really reside. In a technological
context that enables the rapid and mostly accurate transmission of visual data,
"Buttons" poetically links us to another person, another beating heart, even as we
press the button on a camera to preserve our own intimate moment. Where do we
8 PUBLIC 34
D: \personal
end and where does the other begin? What counts as personal, as a story? Digital
technologies challenge us to think about these questions in new ways.
Finally, we hope you are left wondering, as we are, about what's on your own
hard drive. Photos of first steps and ancestors, half-finished novels, amateur
web-cam striptease, poems, travelogues. The life you want but do not have. The
life you have and never knew you wanted. Your Sims characters. Second Life.
Interactive cinema. A database story of everything you've ever bought at the grocery
store. Hypertexted love letters to pass to your children-better yet, wiki love letters
that can be added to by successive generations. With a push of a button you could
be sharing with a million people. You probably already are. But why? More shoring
up against the ruins. Aggressive compliance in a surveillance culture. Anti-commercial
antidote. Loneliness. Beauty. Because we're terrified and won't be silenced.
Because we love stories. Because we are sick of stories and want to leave so many
digital traces so as to become unintelligible. Hide in plain sight. All about us.
Because it's not about us anymore-as we aggregate, concretize, build viral,
collective myths. Just the irresistible pull of audience. Watching. Or maybe just
writing themselves. Poetry, noise. Stop, listen. Read these pieces and watch the
DVD. Go naked-hit that publish button.
NOTES
1 Wardrip-Fruin, N. & P. Harrigan, First Person: New Media as Story, Peiformance, and Game,
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
2 Hayles, K., Writin8 Machines. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
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Introduction

Hoh, Ben

What's in the Box? How Mundanity and Terror Are Modulated in the Blogging of Trauma

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