(Above is a plate from my art project titled “Family Portrait #3”. Each one of the plates set at the table [featured in my background photo of my blog] is covered with family photos, both new and old, representing one of the fourteen members of my immediate family: five sisters, six brothers, my mother, father and me. This is my plate and part of a visual exploration of the ways the autobiographical occurs within the context of family.)
When I first thought of choosing a photo to post as a background for my blog, I immediately thought of a fourth year art installation project I had created for one of my Visual Art classes here at UBC. Because it contained written memories of family events that had occurred around my family’s dinner table growing up, I felt it was an appropriate link between myself and our course material. Like the Post-Secret Blog my art project combines both autobiography and the visual arts. The impetus behind my focus on autobiographical art began after the death of my mother in the spring of 2010 with my exploration and reflection on how biographies are formulated. After this week’s readings I was reminded of a paper I had read for one of my art theory courses, written by Sherry Turkle entitled, “What Makes an Object Evocative?”
In her paper she talks about “object narratives, voices that speak…about familiar objects…and how these objects become part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within (307)”. Thinking of digital autobiographies, I couldn’t help but compare this to the computer or cell phone as objects where these autobiographies are revealed. The computer and cell phone act like a diary where thoughts and ideas are recorded and posted on social media websites. Here inner life simultaneously flows outward and is also expanded as new thoughts and ideas are shared and absorbed.
This I believe is the lure of social media networks: recognition and validation from a known or anonymous source. Sometimes the “knowing” comes only through the context of the comments given by an individual, or individuals referred to as “friends” in communities like Facebook. On social media one can remain as anonymous as one likes, actually formulating an “ideal” self. Like the algorithmic formulas that edit content for Facebook and the internet, one can edit the content you post about yourself so that one continues to receive the kind of responses one ideally wants thus reflecting the individual you want projected to the world. Posts become like Marcel Mauss’ idea of types of “gifts [that] retain something of their maker” (312). Posts or comments can be seen as a type of digital gift, objects that serve a larger purpose within a society. Here technology has allowed an expansion of arenas for self-actualization.
Six-Word Memoir is where verbal creativity and the often ironical defining of one’s life is actualized whereas Post-Secret often represents one’s artistic creativity in a more explicit, and sober way.
Sherry Turkel says it is when “people exchange objects, they assert and confirm their roles in a social system, with all its historical inequalities and contradictions. A gift carries an economic and relational web; the object is animated by the network within it” (312). The web of the internet allow animation of people’s lives and stories: digital autobiographies are made and shared.
Post-Secret provides the format for autobiographies that may not have otherwise been told or heard while the written constrictions of the Six-Word Memoir provides a niche to explore the effectiveness of language in creating an autobiography. The first is visually creative while incorporating a sense of deliberateness through the process of making and then mailing your secret. One has to be reflective and serious enough about sharing to buy a stamp and mail a secret in. On the other hand, Six-Word Memoir requires more mental gymnastics to author a memoir but because of the ease of posting it online, it encourages repeated participation in the process of sharing.
Relating this back to my dinner table autobiography, the collection and writing of the individual stories by hand was very involved. Now it has also evolved from an instillation project to become part of a digital community. The stories have extended from my family of fourteen to a larger online “family”. This adds new dimension to the idea behind my art project: that it is within the context of family that we are the hearers, the actors and the tellers of our own biographies. However the physicality of the work is lost here and all the stories sitting in the serving dishes on the table cannot be pulled out and read. My original autobiographical installation piece requires the viewer to be a participant, to “experience” being around the table where stories happen and are told.