Revisiting the research paper - Version 3

Revisiting the research paper:

The research question:

Transitional digital objects:

Fluidity in compositing an autobiography

or a failure to create a portrait of the whole?

Abstract:

The paper should explore the transitional aspect of digital objects in relation to autobiography. D.W. Winnicott coined the term ‘transitional objects’, it travels around the theme object and fantasy. The paper assumes the fluid nature of digital objects, “a new media object” could be “variable, mutable, liquid” as per Manovich’s definition. Placing autobiography as the aim from transitional digital objects manipulation, the paper will question whether the fluidity will act as a facilitator to autobiographical visual writing or will it fail to create a portrait of the whole?

The first part will be dedicated to look at the fluidity of the digital objects through the work of theoreticians and practitioners who have worked on the object theme; doubting the third dimensionality on screen by Hollis Frampton, “emotional objects” of Sherry Tuckle, the Cult of Less’s initiative to upload their lives on external hard drives and online services platforms, and challenging belief in Michael Craig-Martin’s “An Oak Tree”.

The second part will be focused on autobiography in the digital realm. Exploring the “technomadic” and the “hyperimprovisational narrative artist” of Mark Amerika, Nietsche’s concept of “the whole no longer lives at all: it is composed, calculated, artificial, a fictitious thing”, Marcel Proust’s autobiography triggered by the “Madeleine”…

Mark Freeman in “Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, and Narrative” suggests linking autobiography to recollection and development:

“'re' makes reference to the past, 'collection' makes reference to a present act, an act, as we put it earlier, of gathering together what might have been dispersed or lost. Framed another way, the word recollection holds within it reference to the two distinct ways we often speak about history: as the trail of past events or 'past presents' that have culminated in now and as the act of writing, the act of gathering them together, selectively and imaginatively, into a followable story…”

Whereas Foucault considers “a great deal more that is accidental in both history in general and in our own life histories in particular than we might wish to avow. Perhaps we have reverted too often to a kind of wholistic fictionalization of the past, imposing unity and continuity on that which doesn't deserve it.”