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Back to the Venn Diagram. I would label the right circle with the ridiculously wide umbrella term Multi-Media Performance Art. I would put in the performances and music vidYOs I make as Princeß Tralabeeka, my YouTube persona Br00keMsweet88, owtfyt blaugging, maybe some of the less commerical design and motion graphics work I do. This work has been most greatly influenced by new social technology – not only in the form and medium of what I make, but the the way this technology has inherently changed our society; this is something I am intrigued by and am responding to.
Last August I get to spend two weeks at a pine-tree-encrusted paradise of toads and canoes, the itty-bitty northern Wisconsin cabin I have spent summers at my whole life. There’s nothing even resembling the internet up there, but as I walked by the oven installed by my great-grandfather Forrest Bennet I could have sworn I heard the little chime of a new gchat. My ears perked up. Who’s talking to me?
It was not a gchat, it was a teapot knocking against the burner, but isn’t it fascinating how we are now so attuned to a set of sounds that didn’t even exist before? Certainly this is not a new phenomenon– the sound of a locomotive was a wholly new sound that became ingrained in our brains, as was the ringing of the telephone – but the sounds we now associate with getting some kind of new information are so subtle. It’s not like “OH DAMN, THAT’S A TRAIN,” but instead “Oh, that soft series of tones is a new email on my iPhone,” and “Oh, that background whirring on the song I made in GarageBand is my overworked harddrive,” and “Oh, that tiny click at the beginning of my PhotoBooth dance video is me hitting the space bar to start All The Single Ladies in iTunes.”