Quantity time

Abstract

This research and practice compendium works to question the ways in which relationships with digital objects and digital selves are being naturalized, and more specifically, what is to be done with the dead-digital-data-body the profiles and myriad of accounts created by users accumulated over the span of a digital life? These points will be interrogated, asked in ways that bring to light the tensions present as society undergoes a quintessential moment of technogenesis, or the co-evolution between technologies and humans. I will work to narrow an understanding of this hyper-evolution to that of a moment of micro-technogenesis; which could describe the observed major change in usage and interaction with mobile phone/smart phone technologies. Micro-technogenesis can also be used to define our heightened personal technology access and deeply developed relationships with digital space/digital time on a relatively short time-scale. The process of micro-technogenesis has acclimated us to the terms of digital interaction faster than has been acknowledged. Technogenesis, micro-technogenesis, and digital time/digital space will be discussed in specific and illusory terms as a way of setting the stage for a hyper hypothetical research discussion on digital legacy. I use Facebook as an example of a digital space that utilizes many modes of digital time in order to extend the relationships between digital objects and active human users, which complicates and opens new ways of understanding quickly expanding possibilities for digital existence. Additionally, I will provide examples of performed experience based installations that I have developed as part of my art making practice, which have helped to contextualize my research and act as experiments in methodology.