Response 3-AustinH

By far the most interesting example of “autobotography” among those listed on the class site is, to me, Modern Living / Neurotica by Han Hoogerbrugge. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to really dive in during lab time (as it’s Flash-based, I couldn’t get it running on my iPad), but upon checking it out afterwards, it’s become a good deal clearer to me. By my understanding when taking it as a whole, Modern Living / Neurotica is a digital library of an individual’s internalized expression. This is something that no other age in history has afforded a single person; the capacity to express their emotions and thought processes no matter how abstract they are in their most primal form. Art and media have long been the methods by which we translate these abstractions that really make us human. The spoken word, print, dance, painting, sculpture, music, photography, cinema, etc. are all – in their most traditional definitions – nothing more than other languages meant to convey what originally starts as an indescribable and wholly unique human perception/sensation. Traditional media are the processes by which we homogenize the expression of thought.

Modern Living / Neurotica here, in my view, attempts to express these feelings by way of multimedia to express some of these thoughts in a form closer to the way they are initially conceived, regardless of how rational or understandable they may be to an outside observer. The phenomenological perception of these thoughts and feelings is transliterated instead of transliterating the thoughts and feelings themselves. This is a high-level of self-expression that “art” in some more niche senses attempts to capture, but traditional art is still confined to the limits of physical reality and what we as inhabitants can afford to manipulate into being.

The virtual reality of the internet or that of any purely digital environment is not bound by the same rules, nor by extension is the new media we can create within it. In fact, the limits of virtual reality are ostensibly only those we impose on it as its users, its grand designers, its creators. In reality, we can only create within the limits of the physicality we work with. To that end, traditional media and art can only ever serve to hit a stopping point: a point of completion to the best of the designer’s ability where the objective of expression in a particular format is met. New media are the new formats or amalgam of old media that seek to subvert those rules of reality and serve a purpose beyond the mere comprehension of their design. In this way, somewhat ironically (as human creation by nature lacks any sort of telos), new media can be teleological, serving to express something deeper than the individual or communal assignment of purpose. And with that in mind, in the measure of accurately replicating and portraying the essence of our beings, it is quite probably, in the course of all human history up to this point, the tool best suited to preserving and sharing our humanity.

Also I checked out JenniCam and just want to point out that the reality show Real World started in 1992 and JenniCam started in 96, so I’d hardly say she was the inspiration for the reality TV genre. She probably inspired lots of online webcam-based platforms and companies, though.