Just be yourself!

"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."-Nathaniel Hawthorne

Our discussions in class last week  had me thinking about one of my favorite quotes (stated above). Hawthorne may be an old guy who never could have possibly foreseen the depths of the Internet, but I think his quote about identity rings true about the way we split our lives between online and real life. The "multitude" in this situation would be the Internet--and the "self" would be our everyday life.

After playing Second Life in class the other day, I caught myself thinking about the game quite a bit afterward. It isn't something that I would want to include in my everyday life (just because I don't have the time) but it interested me that some people do just that. For the people that play Second Life often, wrapped up in an identity that is not their own, I wonder what it is like to re-enter the real world to participate in something like school or a job.

Though I've engaged in some online gaming platforms and have certainly maintained Internet personalities that not everyone in my real world life is aware of, I've never pretended to be someone I'm not or become so embroiled in an online identity that I had to switch back and forth with effort.

Yesterday I was scrolling through my tumblr dashboard and came across the following artwork by Johan Rosenmunthe. The works are part of a series called, "Off II," made in 2010, and I feel they relate very well to the concepts of identity that we've been talking about in class.

Rosenmunthe's artist statement reads: "Through digital communication like Facebook, Twitter, online dating and personal websites, the representation of our personality becomes more and more streamlined. We have the possibility to project an idea of how we are as a person into the world around us, but with the constant option of censoring information and invent fictional characteristics. Never have we had access to so much information about each other, and never has the information been so unreliable."

These are the concepts I feel our class finds a base.

He goes on to say the following (I have bolded parts I found interesting):

"In this project I have downloaded pictures of ‘friends’ that I only know through the Internet, and given them a new context. The persons are only visible through a digital representation, while the surroundings are as analog as possible. The sceneries are photographed places that invited to interaction – places that missed the company of human beings. The milieu adds a new meaning to the way the digital personas act, and gives their simplified characteristics meaning and personality again, by adding a setting to their digital components.

The project looks directly at the dichotomy of digital and analog processes, juxtaposing one against the other, and challenges viewers to make sense of what seems like a fractured image. The images themselves provide scenes of isolation and loneliness, as the characters within are so seemingly detached from their environment.

These images come to life when the viewer move in relation to them – seen up close, the people are blurred and the viewer has to step back to bring the motive into focus. At the same time, the scene in which the person is placed is blurred when viewed from a distance. So you have to move back and forth – between non-figurative colored squares and figurative representations of personality."

Rosenmunthe's art is trying to answer the question that I've been pondering--how do we move between two identities? It seems that he might say you can't. No matter what, one of the aspects of your self will be blurred, whether it is your online self (the image of the self) or the real world self (the image of the environment). 

Johan Rosenmunthe makes mixed media art. Check out his website for more, though this is his only project explicitly related to RHMS 270!