Virtual Identities: Constructed Personas in a Digital World
It has always been hard for me to put into words the purpose of my art. Ever since I was a child, I have been content to draw depictions of imagined, beautiful fantasy heroines. Some have been reinterpretations of existing characters from other artists, such as the Disney princesses, or Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon, however the majority have stemmed from my own imagination. Despite this, the purpose and inspiration behind these characters, until this year, have always been unknown, even to me. For the longest time, they have represented nothing more than what they appear to be on the surface: pretty pictures of pretty people. However throughout this year my art has evolved beyond being “just pretty pictures” and the role and function of these characters has become integral in shaping and expressing my interests in the complex concept of self-identity.
“Realism may be necessary to survival, but unless people are also touched by fantasy, they risk imprisonment in their own narrow worlds. Too much fantasy, however, can lead to isolation, to a frivolous and—ultimately—insane existence.”[1] We live in a world in which the realms of fantasy and reality are becoming a seamless experience. With the advent of computer technologies, and the Internet, the boundaries between what is “real” and what is “false” are becoming indistinguishable to the point that the ability to define oneself in this often ambiguous world, results in an unseen overlapping of fiction and imagination. The point of this overlap, or this juncture between “real” and “false” results in the formation of alternate personas, or ‘virtual identities.’ These identities, which are “created at the interface between the physical body and the computer screen,”[2] include avatars, blogs, Myspace and Facebook profiles; they are our digital selves, the ‘stand-ins’ for a physical body. They are edited, and carefully chosen to be the masks we wear in these face-less digital realms.
However, a virtual identity is not limited to digital environments. I see virtual identities as existing in a much more complicated sense. They can be any part to a larger identity of ‘self.’ They are the varying manifestations of personal and impersonal components, be it though digital spaces, or through a more literal and physical manifestations such as the decision to dye ones hair, or change their clothing style. How I dress and act within a work environment versus that of my home environment are completely different. Nevertheless my identity at work is as valid a virtual identity as my home persona. Humans define themselves through this notion of identity, of being something or someone; what defines them, and what defines me, ultimately is directly related to the environment we are surrounded by as well as those co-existing within this environment. Class, race, gender, morality etc. are all variables in shaping these differing ‘personal identities.’ As an artist, my life and interests, as well as the lives and interests of those around me become part of my self or personal identity, and thusly part of my art. I am not trying to create art that will change the world, but I am trying to present something that is a record of my inspiration, which is driven by my relationships to the people, ideas, and things that inhabit my world. I am trying to make manifest my own virtual identities, in order to define myself in this indefinite world.
One artist who has largely influenced my works, and who often deals with putting virtual identities on display has been Andy Warhol, particularly through his 1961 piece titled: Marilyn Diptych. For Warhol, art became something that was virtually an assembly line; he created paintings based on images from American popular culture, and then duplicated them time and time again through the process of silk-screening. The Marilyn Diptych showcases this technique through the use of a promotional studio head-shot of Marilyn Monroe which is then multiplied upwards of fifty times. Warhol tints one side of the diptych in garish, over-the top colors while leaving the remaining half in black and white as a stark contrast between an image that is just a photo of a star and the glamorous mask a star wears. The use of highly saturated colors, and intentional placement only exemplifies Warhol’s interest in representing a particular public persona of that is ‘Marilyn Monroe.’
Many of Warhol’s paintings were centered on this idea of the representation of public personas, almost to the point of obsession. His artistic over-indulgence in the materialistic world of Hollywood was meant as a way to comment on the obsessed nature of fans to stars. Hollywood stars and starlets throughout history have been practically idolized, however often what is idolized is not the actual star, but what they represent and the constructed persona they project. Stars such as Marilyn Monroe, feed a never-ending cycle of mediated image control. Warhol himself was famous for this same type of public control of persona. In his very exhibitionist style life, he created an expectation for outrageous, over the top appearances, which I believe were ultimately used as a mask for his private or ‘real’ self.[3] It seemed to me that what really gave Warhol inspiration, was this universally human tendency to project an identity that is not fully owned, but constructed. For my works, I gain inspiration from the opposite; I want to display, and create a spectacle of my virtual identities. However, unlike Warhol, these displayed identities are a physical manifestation of my personal ‘mask.’ I am not invested in making publicly available a falsehood, but rather, I wish to convey a certain level of truth, or realness through the use of fantastical imagery.
One of my own works, which attempted to manifest this level of ‘realness’, was one part to a three-piece work titled ViVi (2007). ViVi is a symbolic representation of a particular side of myself that I identify as being the “girly-crazy” persona. Whereas the other two parts of this work were a combination of several peoples’ private personas dubbed: Beautiful Knife,ViVi is the persona that is specific to me alone. She existed during my semester abroad in Tokyo Japan, and was reinterpreted through a collage of actual items, feelings and experiences had during my time there. Her necklace is from the designer Vivienne Westwood, who is popular among the ultra-chic Harajuku population, and has been coveted by myself on numerous occasions as I shopped through the trendy Harajuku boutiques. The mask she wears, is an actual sleep aide mask I purchased from the popular gag store Donki, and represents my frustration with having to leave Japan, and the culture I had grown to love more than my own. By giving her a name, but leaving no record of her identity, I am allowing the audience to create their own histories for her. I intentionally left her identity unknown, much in the same way virtual identities are left unrevealed. I enjoy knowing that I alone know what she represents, and ‘who’ she is, and for everyone else, it is only a mystery. By naming her after the Japanese magazine from which she was found instead of myself, I wished to separate her from the main unit that is ‘Rebecca,’ and align her with my fashion obsessed, consumer-culture saturated virtual identity. She is me, but she is only a small part of me, and as such she required a title which would set her apart from myself. Furthermore, I excluded all indicators of a background or foreground setting, instead suspending her from a wall scroll-type frame backed with a sheer lace. Lace fabric to me has always sort of epitomized a clichéd sense of being ‘girly,’ and as such I found I appropriate to remove ViVi from a real world environment, and instead surrounded her with a symbol of feminine delicacy.
There is a correlation between my works and those of artist Vanessa Beecroft, who like me, is searching for a means to construct her image of self through the external forces of contemporary society. Her 1998 exhibition titled Show featured a multitude of barely clothed and naked models standing in Gucci bikinis and Prada heels in front of a live audience. Unable to move or speak, the audience is allowed to interact with the women, but they are restricted from initiating a reciprocal interaction. According to Beecroft in this way, “there is always a virtual distance between the work and the audience. During the performance there is a kind of silence. They are totally detached from the audience.”[4] I revel in this idea of audience detachment in my works. As seen with ViVi, I am reaching for a way to describe my inner self in a way that is seen, and guessed at, but never completely understood. I am putting parts of my life on display, but I am excluding the reasoning or history behind these displays. Furthermore, I use the medium of collage to combine both personal and impersonal visual sources. In the case of Beecroft’s models, “the ‘recruits’ for this army are nameless specimens that represent physical standards of loveliness at the end of the 20th century. Likewise, the impression of ‘self’ in this work, and perhaps for many women not included in this work is measured according to superhuman, impersonal ideals.”[5] In the same way, for my impersonal sources, I nearly exclusively appropriate imagery from fashion magazines, due to the fantastical quality of the models. To me these models are not real women, but are clever constructions of the camera lens and the Photoshop airbrush tool. They have been captured, painted, drawn and fashioned to resemble fairies, and nymphs from some undefined dream world.
The Beautiful Knife series (2007) was a set of works set up to be a culmination of these ideas. With this piece, I still wished to maintain this sense of personal detachment from the audience. Although I did not want to reveal everything about the personas I was presenting, I nevertheless wanted the viewers to be invested in the exploration and discovery of the ‘true’ nature of these identities. By being able to relate to my identities, my goal was for my audience to thusly be able to see fantastical constructions present in their own daily lives. In order to do this, like Beecroft, I chose to borrow from the constructed nature of the language of fashion and advertisement so as to comment on not only how these mediums promote virtual identities, but also how this practice of promotion had directly affected me. I slightly altered my source material from ViVi, this time relying heavily on personal photographs and snapshots versus found images with an emotional connection a certain memory or emotion. These collaged snapshots were a glorification of sorts of the lifestyle that my three other housemates and I led; the four of us were cut, pasted, collaged, so that our personalities became ‘larger than life.’ They were obvious exaggerations of how we would ever have acted in public, yet they held a certain level of truth to our private lives. ‘Chinese Aviator Lady’, ‘Cold Mother Bitch’, ‘Pinstripe MotherFucker’, and ‘HxC EGG’ were our virtual identities and our projected personas. However, despite this they were as easily disposable to the audience as the fanzine format they were presented in. The readability of the fanzine was questionable due to the chaotic and crammed nature of the design layout, and the zine’s content offended more so than causing a relatable connection. In order to resolve this, I knew that I needed to tackle and develop a solution to these problems in my future works, and that I needed to somehow take myself outside of such a limited and hard to read format, both conceptually and literally. I needed to aim towards something much more generalized and intrinsically readable.
For help with this task, I began to investigate installation art, and it was Kabakov’s “The Man Who Flew into Space From His Apartment” (1970) which caught my attention the most. Kabakov is a former soviet based artist who, after the collapse of the union, created art about the cultural history of a now “vanished system.”[6] “The Man Who Flew into Space…” juxtaposes the grand ideals of the Soviet Space race with that of the normal, ordinary lives of Soviet Russians. The room contains a combination of real life objects, and fantasy created by Kabakov; the walls are overflowing with blueprints, posters and newspaper clippings that carefully document the space race. However the addition of a large hole in the roof and catapult by Kabakov suggests that whoever was living here has sent himself into space from the comforts of his own home. Kabakov notes, “The person who lived here flew into space from his room, having blown up the ceiling of the attic above it. He always, as far as he remembered, felt that he was not quite an inhabitant of this earth, and constantly felt the desire to leave it, to escape beyond its boundaries. And as an adult he conceived of his departure into space.”[7] Kabakov is creating a story and a history where there is none present, much like I wished to do with Beautiful Knife; I wanted to physically project the many sides of my life onto other people and have them be interested in these projections. However Kabakov not only created a character, he created a literal space for his virtual identity; something tangible, yet mysterious which begged to be interacted with.
To resolve this issue of interaction and audience relation, I turned towards video projection. To me, projection is the perfect solution; unlike Kabakov’s spaces which could be physically interacted with, projection not only demands attention just from its sheer scale, but it cannot be altered or touched outside of the shadow cast by the audience as it may pass in front the projector. By projecting my virtual identities, they are literally being put on display, but still harbored at a safe distance. I am the sole creator of these identities, and although external forces influenced them, the need to literally interact with an audience through a touchable format such as a fanzine, is no longer a major concern in my work. For me, the importance lies in the history of the identity being projected, and creation of a narrative that is both informative, self-reflective, yet still removed from being completely defined within reality. My projection piece titled Why is that Woman SO Large!? (2008) attempts to create a space in which not only houses a specific virtual identity, but like Kabakov, also provide indicators of a past history or story behind this identity without having to be completely straightforward. Woman is a 3-walled projection, set up so that each projector panel displays a different room, or different part of the same room. Within the first room an unnamed pink haired girl is seen sitting demurely on an ornate white couch as she flips through a book while talking to apparently no one (as she in the only one in the room). The second panel is of a window which shows close-up details of the girl as she talks to, laughs into, and shies away from the camera lens, while the third and final projection shows the girl standing, twirling and even playing with a toy of sorts until she gets bored and leaves the room. She reappears within the other two rooms periodically, but never fully interacts with her other selves; she maintains her distance. This projection presents a convoluted self-portrait of sorts, as the girl is meant to be a playful, child-like side of myself, however when in the installations space, the viewer is overwhelmed by a trapped feeling of awkwardness, not light hearted playfulness. The girl at times seems extremely bored and unsatisfied with her surroundings, and even after leaving, she is still stuck within this realm of floral purples and whites. She chooses to interact with no one in particular, and essentially is stuck within this closed little fantasy realm.
Visually, I find my greatest source material in contemporary Japanese illustrators and animators, including those of the works of Yoshitaka Amano. Amano’s influences in particular, are present in my character designs for Woman, namely that of my 2008 digital collage LoLi-pop! Like Amano, in my designs I am trying to create women who are both mystical and powerful, but who also maintain a sense of hyper femininity. Amano’s characters manage to maintain this dichotomy of power and beauty. An example of this can be seen in his 1984 watercolor painting of an untitled character design from Baku Yumemakura horror novel series titled Chimera. In this design, a young girl is framed in the center of the image holding a red flower while a pair of butterflies float around her head. She is framed by what appears to be a moon, or possibly a halo, as reminiscent of 12th century Italian Gothic alter paintings. This ‘halo’ is possibly symbolic of the potential pure or virginal characteristics of this particular character. The flowing, organic nature of his lines and bright, pastel palette place the character as being a symbol of idealized rather than obtainable beauty, and it is this obvious element of fantasy that captivates the viewer rather than trying to convince them that what they are seeing is ‘real.’ The girl in LoLi-pop! is meant to be the same as the girl in the projection, however because of her being a drawing versus a video recording, she is not understood as a real person but one who is obviously imaginatively created. LoLi-pop! is the idealized fantasy image of an already fantastical projected identity, and is provided as a visual contrast between literally drawn fictions, and “real” or recorded fictions (as in Woman).