____Portable Home

Claiming the Portable Home: Research into Creative Acts of Embodying Mixed-Reality and Identity Placemaking within the Digital Domain.

PhD
This research, through practice, will chronicle the hybrid experience of operating within the digital domain and activity of socially placemaking in order to define personal space within the situation of the digital domain.

I define the digital domain as technology mediated networked space which exists through internet and satellite transmission. The situation of the digital domain is the resulting body of purposeful acts to socially operate within the domain made apparent through considered communication with others in active forums, blogs, social networking profiles, avatar creation and use in virtual word, etc. This space is physically experienced by interacting via a machine and it emotionally extends human-to-human contact through the internet and satellite transmission in non-linear patterns and trajectories to locations around the world.

Mixed Reality (MR) is the combined result of ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’ in one space, or a place where physical experience and a digital experience merge, where the situation of the digital domain is emotionally felt and embodied.

Placemaking, borrowed from Urban Planning and Architecture, has a poetic resonance in the activity of geo-locating, claiming and creating. For the purpose of this research I associate the term to deliberate acts of profile creation in order to socially place a user within online-networked space.

I will devise acts to embody the hybrid space of the digital domain and to place my activity in a personally tailored space. These acts will take shape in the form of documented performance work and have a web presence through blogging and other networks such as Twitter and Second Life. Emphasis will be placed on blending my Second Life avatar, Edwige Pronovost, between the physical world and within the internet to demonstrate the elasticity of the digital domain. These deliberate acts of embodiment will articulate attempts to carve out and proclaim identity, to document hybridized, immersed and augmented experience.

My research will be documented on my blog, which will act as a cultural probe, to collect contextual references, thought process, and captured actions through snapshots, text, and video. It will be a digital sketchbook which references the PhD research activity.

The creative outcome will document the current social shift brought about by online social networking where a non-linear public system of sharing information has initiated a collapse of separated identity, while it simultaneously forces reinvention of new profiles and identities that define the self in order to maintain privacy and security. This view is substantiated by danah boyd, who considers the duality of identity deliberated by the collapse of competing notions of the self into two categories- one’s internal identity and one’s social identity . This fusion of actions creates a locality and a new identity that describe the social context of the situation; the culture of the digital domain, which operates in a public manner. The research will chronicle deliberate acts of visualizing identity and extending self through device to connect with others and to demonstrate that the elastic space of the digital domain is in fact a representation of the situation of the digital domain, whereby humans can embody new technology to extend their physical space and to place themselves within a non-linear narrative.

Research Question
Focussing on the contemporary experience of operating within multiple locations, cultures and spaces simultaneously, how is individual space generated, claimed and situated within the digital domain, how are intimate actions and perceptions of the self articulated within the digital domain, and how is the self extended to reach others via the digital domain?
Aims
1. To generate, locate, and situate the self within the technology mediated physical and emotional environment of the digital domain.
2. To investigate embodiment within technology enhanced environments by extending the boundary of reality to include both the physical and the ‘virtual’ as one hybrid functional/dysfunctional operating space within the digital domain.
3. To demonstrate, through art practice, actions of extending the self to others in attempts to carve out a socially networked space which exposes personal identity.

Objectives
1. To explore claim and perception of space using a mash-up of geo-locational data, narrative, public social networking platform content, SL experiences and other appropriate forms of social experience generated within the situation of the digital domain to document and place the self.
2. To embody the digital domain through performance by living vicariously through Edwige Pronovost, a Second Life avatar, to analyse how humans as characters appropriate and make social or structural claims on space, in particular in the effort to form a home, and to document the physically immersive and augmented situation encountered within digital space. Performances in physical space will be matched with similar encounters inworld and recorded through video, photo-documentation and narrative documentation on my blog.
3. To gather this research via the cultural probe method using myself as the case study, as a ‘trans-individual’ actively carving out a home within the digital domain. This placemaking will take shape as a series of performances, designed journeys and collaborative events within the digital domain.