desire artwork: freudster 2006+ ~ work in progress
intro:
Where Zizek is critical and nearly sexist in his dismissal of hysteria in the introductory quote, we embrace it. In the proposed project FREUDSTER, the originally phallic discourse of psychoanalysis is subverted. In FREUDSTER, the hysteric-user uses the body/image and language of Freud to perform new discourses, subversions, and erotic plays not based on the phallic gazing scenario but rather in more complex, negotiated ways that involve explorations of the boundaries of self and subjectivity. This invites a hysterical condition that is at once humorous and haunting. This condition, I hope, helps to facilitate a kind of deep play where real work of unearthing new modes for relationships and negotiated meanings take place. Indeed, this is what becomes foregrounded rather than the typical locus of self expressed through the profile as stable, singular, and unitary. The disturbing and the liberatory conjoin to reveal a performative construction of identity and to embrace and resuscitate those first pioneers who set out to demonstrate this. ...
The project FREUDSTER proposes an alternative, humorous, critical social networking site. Rather than facilitating stable identities through profiles and branching superficial connections, FREUDSTER destabilizes identities by foregrounding, then extending and complicating relationships. FREUDSTER offers multiple psychological portraits and "diagnoses" instead of Friendster's testimonies or myspace's comments. FREUDSTER offers a space to peel "yellow wallpaper" instead of Facebook's wall.
In FREUDSTER's first consultation, similar to the initial profile questionnaire of other social networking sites, new users may be asked Freudian questions, such as where they are in the Oedipus cycle (possible answers are in a drop-down menu and might be i'm just a babe on a mountain; asking 'who am i?'; i just killed my father; contemplating the sphinx; i am sleeping with my mother; i've clawed my eyes out; etc.). Users might use their own name, or select from a drop down menu of Freud's legendary patients: Fraulein Anna O, Frau Emmy Von N, Miss Lucy R, Dora, etc. The only option in the drop down menu for gender is female, of course. But the profile will not necessarily be the visualized locus of orientation; instead the consultations, diagnoses and wallpaper between users will take prevalence. Users interact through consultations or wallpaper. Consultations are highly controlled question and answer relationships; wallpaper scenarios play out unexpected, random encounters with known and/or unknown others.
The above cites a few examples of how I envision some elements of this project.
I situate this project at the intersection between a critical inquiry into the underlying assumptions of web 2.0 technology, and the cultivation of a participatory aesthetics. FREUDSTER reveals the assumptions of the typical social networking site through the offering of an alternative. The project seeks to be ironic in that it is simultaneously liberating and disturbing an hysterical scenario, and yet also seeks to be compelling enough to truly explore in its own right.
1Ulrich Gutmair and Chris Flor, "Hysteria and Cyberspace: Interview with Slavoj Zizek" (07/10/1998) http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2492/1.html
intro:
...cyberspace often functions in the hysterical way, which is exactly this radical uncertainty: I don't know whom my letter will reach. I don't know what the other wants from me and thus I try in advance to reflect this uncertainty. --Slavoj ?i?ek 1Web2.0, the social networking site specifically, has introduced a new arena for relationships that often treats connections like commodities and, is entirely reliant on a specific mode of subjectivity known as the profile. Social networking sites are now built into the social daily fabric of millions of lives, and the architecture of these "spaces" and the relationships they foster largely go unquestioned.
Where Zizek is critical and nearly sexist in his dismissal of hysteria in the introductory quote, we embrace it. In the proposed project FREUDSTER, the originally phallic discourse of psychoanalysis is subverted. In FREUDSTER, the hysteric-user uses the body/image and language of Freud to perform new discourses, subversions, and erotic plays not based on the phallic gazing scenario but rather in more complex, negotiated ways that involve explorations of the boundaries of self and subjectivity. This invites a hysterical condition that is at once humorous and haunting. This condition, I hope, helps to facilitate a kind of deep play where real work of unearthing new modes for relationships and negotiated meanings take place. Indeed, this is what becomes foregrounded rather than the typical locus of self expressed through the profile as stable, singular, and unitary. The disturbing and the liberatory conjoin to reveal a performative construction of identity and to embrace and resuscitate those first pioneers who set out to demonstrate this. ...
The project FREUDSTER proposes an alternative, humorous, critical social networking site. Rather than facilitating stable identities through profiles and branching superficial connections, FREUDSTER destabilizes identities by foregrounding, then extending and complicating relationships. FREUDSTER offers multiple psychological portraits and "diagnoses" instead of Friendster's testimonies or myspace's comments. FREUDSTER offers a space to peel "yellow wallpaper" instead of Facebook's wall.
In FREUDSTER's first consultation, similar to the initial profile questionnaire of other social networking sites, new users may be asked Freudian questions, such as where they are in the Oedipus cycle (possible answers are in a drop-down menu and might be i'm just a babe on a mountain; asking 'who am i?'; i just killed my father; contemplating the sphinx; i am sleeping with my mother; i've clawed my eyes out; etc.). Users might use their own name, or select from a drop down menu of Freud's legendary patients: Fraulein Anna O, Frau Emmy Von N, Miss Lucy R, Dora, etc. The only option in the drop down menu for gender is female, of course. But the profile will not necessarily be the visualized locus of orientation; instead the consultations, diagnoses and wallpaper between users will take prevalence. Users interact through consultations or wallpaper. Consultations are highly controlled question and answer relationships; wallpaper scenarios play out unexpected, random encounters with known and/or unknown others.
The above cites a few examples of how I envision some elements of this project.
I situate this project at the intersection between a critical inquiry into the underlying assumptions of web 2.0 technology, and the cultivation of a participatory aesthetics. FREUDSTER reveals the assumptions of the typical social networking site through the offering of an alternative. The project seeks to be ironic in that it is simultaneously liberating and disturbing an hysterical scenario, and yet also seeks to be compelling enough to truly explore in its own right.
1Ulrich Gutmair and Chris Flor, "Hysteria and Cyberspace: Interview with Slavoj Zizek" (07/10/1998) http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2492/1.html