Self-Portraiture/Self-Other Dynamics

WHAT IS PERFORMANCE?

I like how Carlson uses so many different definitions of "performance" in general to show how complex and fluctuating the term "performance art" really is. One thing I had been a little confused about going into the reading was how daily life figured in to performance art, because to me, essentially everyone plays a part of someone else. We all act differently for different people, to the point where it almost seems that we lose our true selves. For instance, this project we are doing soon...several of the people I talked to wanted to make their performance piece a showing of their true personality. They seemed to think that they needed a project to hide behind to actually do what they felt was true to their personality. Carlson says that there is a difference between "doing and performing" which comes down to attitude, but I disagree. After reading her opinion, I feel more solid on my own. Carlson's point that some things are done without thought and therefore not considered performance, does not make sense to me personally. In our society, people put on faces so much that it becomes part of us. Any learned behavior we project without thought is just another sad indication that we are afraid to just be ourselves. The more we hide who we are in public, the more we forget who we are at home. The performance is always intentional, it just is used so much that it becomes second nature. Essentially, we are always acting for an audience, even if that audience is ourselves when we look in the mirror.

BENEATH THIS MASK ANOTHER MASK

I am interested in this idea of the photo as "death" that is represented by Jones in this chapter, especially in relation to self-portraiture. One thing I am interested in exploring is the difference between film and digital photography in relation to this topic. One quote Jones used really caught my eye: "the photograph is a screen, the site where subject and object, self and other, intertwine to produce intersubjective meaning." In a regular photo this might be true because it is an actual tangible piece of paper that is kind of like a physical remnant of a person, caught with light on photo paper and preserved. But digital photography seems different. You are not preserving anything but pixels, and the pixels are part of the compter, alive essentially, in the computer and on the web. Therefore, your picture in pixels is a more live representation than a photo in general is, and the issue of death is compromised. Also, regular photographs are expensive and painstaking, and each produced photo is a rememberance of a person that can be kept after their death, but digital is much easier to take and so many photos may exist that after the person dies you could practically animate them into a video, living and moving and active, keeping the person alive in pixels and in motion. Below I have uploaded a series of photos I took when I got my new camera and then posted the pics on facebook:

I have dozens of photo albums like this. My facebook is much like a daily photo diary. I am still frozen in time in the pictures, and the person watching is, though now viewing through a computer screen rather than a photo surface, still reanimating me as they view me, but since the photos are not a phyiscal remnant in which to be trapped, I feel these pictures are an alive and functioning version of me, almost near to live video of my life through the computer.