Autobotography
Excerpt from "Autobotography," in Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006)
http://www.at-the-edge-of-art.com
The third stage of immune response occurs when lymphocytes alert the immune system to the presence of foreign antigens. In order to do this, they must distinguish between what belongs to the body and what is foreign. An error in this identification could easily lead to fatal vulnerability or suicide. But because lymphocytes are born in bone marrow alongside red blood cells, they learn to distinguish self from non-self at an early stage of development. When it is mature, a lymphocyte matches the shape of its antibody to the shape of the antigen, revealing something that was previously unknown to the body. Though the antibodies cannot precisely say what they have found, their revelation triggers the execution of code to protect the body.
While antibodies' main job is to reveal non-self, they also reveal aspects of the self which remain hidden.1 Digital art can do the same thing. This is the space of autobiography, where the relationship between individual and society, self and other, is articulated. But autobiography 'has not always existed, nor does it exist everywhere', Georges Gusdorf reminds us in his landmark study Conditions & Limits of Autobiography.2 In fact, autobiography is a particularly Euro-American preoccupation, rarely found outside this culture: 'This conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life is the late product of a specific civilization. Throughout human history, the individual does not oppose himself to all others ... lives are so thoroughly entangled that each of them has its center everywhere and nowhere.'3 Philosophies of India and China express caution about the 'evil illusion' of personality and seek salvation in release from the ego. Yoruba and Native American cultures name children after dead ancestors who return in spirit to inhabit the newborn, forming a cycle of life based on community and continuity. The grafting of Christian validation of every life onto the Classical tradition of examination produced St Augustine's Confessions, however, and launched a genre of self-examination that persists in current digital practice. Writers since Augustine have used events in their own lives as inspiration for new forms of narrative, but never before has a technology automatically rendered such details in a form that can be witnessed instantaneously across the globe. In projects such as life_sharing and jennicam, privacy has become a commodity easily traded for artistic capital. Many have wondered if setting up a video camera to record your most quotidian acts or open-sourcing your hard drive are exhibitionism or art.
Even in the Euro-American literary tradition, there is a good deal of controversy about the nature of autobiography--whether it is a distinct genre, whether it can capture 'truth', or whether it is even possible. For Wilhelm Dilthey, autobiography 'occupied a central place as the key to understanding the curve of history, every sort of cultural manifestation, and the very shape and essence of human culture itself'.4 If history offers us an abstracted chronology of events, or a record of the public actions of famous men (and, more rarely, women), autobiography offers a glimpse of an individual life. Roughly translated from its Greek roots, 'autobiography' means 'self- life-writing'. But none of these terms is easily fixed. Autos, or 'self', has been fractured by psychoanalysis, deconstructed and multiplied by post-Structuralism, and dispersed via digital avatars. Bios, 'life', has been rendered equally problematic by the attempt to turn it into art. Formless, chaotic, resistant, life mocks our attempts to give it shape, meaning, or structure. Graphe, usually translated as 'writing' but in fact more accurately 'to mark', suggests a trace produced by some technology. But what does this trace capture or bring into being? Since Werner Heisenberg, we've known that any act of observation changes what is observed. In what ways do digital autobiographies change the observing subject? Since Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan, we've known that the text of autobiography takes on a life of its own, that there is no fixed self which precedes the activity of writing, nor one after the text is complete. For post-Structuralists, the self is always a fiction, and so is the life.
Despite these paradoxes, the Internet has spurred a resurgence of autobiographical practices. One reason for this proliferation may be that our stories have been taken from us, repackaged, and sold back via broadcast media for so long that we are eager to get them back. But this autobiographical urge is not a simple matter of putting new tools into the hands of would-be writers and artists. For every netizen eager to tell all to a worldwide audience, there is another who warns about the abuse of surveillance and the violation of privacy. If the technologies of the Internet and policies like Total Information Awareness and ECHELON5 make us wary about revealing personal information lest it be used against us, how can we account for the massive outpouring of autobiographical data--as text, image, code, or video--online? To whom do our stories belong?
Many of us who followed the jennicam model first became active agents online by publishing home pages: a CV, an album of family photos, a diary of experiences for friends to read, a list of favorite links. While not exactly in the form of conventional autobiography, all of these publications might easily be recognized as expressions of a new digital self. Since these early experiments in homespun HTML, new documentary tools have flooded the Web, including Webcams, blogs, and Flash and QuickTime movies, resulting in a veritable tidal wave of self-revelation. Many of these tools are so easy to use that they seem at times to write the stories of our lives for us--suggesting the term autobotography, the digital self as revealed by bots, or computer programs.
What do these autobotographies reveal? Details of individual lives? Erotic play? Coding virtuosity? Submerged character traits? Perhaps. But, more importantly for this study, autobotography reveals the relationship of individuals to their new contexts or communities of the Internet age, and to the technologies that are being wielded to construct new subjectivities. McLuhan reminded us that the new powers we assume as we wield new tools entail a corresponding loss. If technology is a narcissistic mirror, it is one that extends our abilities in one dimension only to anesthetize and amputate our faculties in another.6 Autobotography provides us with images of who we have become in front of this new mirror. The most powerful autobotographies help us to see both ourselves and the mirror; thus they disrupt the new technology's narcotic effect. Autobotography at its best reveals technological memes that describe how we are being inhabited by our latest tools and how our tools are embodying us.
'We are all chimeras,' Donna Haraway has written, 'theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.'7 This cyborg construction characterizes much of the work in this chapter: lives captured by video camera, egos embodied in hard drives, analysts in the form of algorithms. The boundaries between human and machine are being renegotiated. For the 'bot' in autobotography has infiltrated not just graphe but also bios, and it is the job of autobotographers to chart the new edge between self and society, flesh and machine.
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