I.D Interview
We asked 12 authors, working with the photographic medium, to interpret the concept of the digital identity, by producing a specific multimedia work for this occasion.
“ID interview” was made up to give multiple points of view of emerging and established authors on the theme of Fotonica’s open call.
1-Bärbel Reinhard
Not windows but mirrors.
No face, no shape, everything, nothing.
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
How can I be in so many places?
2- Sarab Collective
I was born twice.First as a thing, then as another one.
At birth.
We all are made of many parts. Of other halves. Sometimes even of animals or plants.
I have many boundaries that spread in the void.
One of them it’s you, the other ones are fragments of my silence.
3- Novella Oliana
“The string game”,
I have always thought about identity as something mobile and changeable that inhabits usand
allow us to interact with the world.
This perception is certainly influenced by the researches I have conducted on the Mediterranean
space, where the aquatic surface actually becomes a vector of transition of symbols, ways of living
and cultures.
I look at Identity as a fabric of connections between me, the other and a context.
Then I’m interested in the way we compose with our gaze the spaces and the same images and
how we inhabit them with the movement and our body.
The Identity inevitably implies a process of relationship and debate, that causes unlimited
possibilities and ways to interact and to exist.
The contemporary visual territory is influenced by this process and at the same time it influences
the process, by changing the way images are perceived, created and experienced.
In my practise I look for images that contain within themselves the germ of the movement and of
the transformation, which is why I call them “performative” or “event images”.
I like to think that they are bio maps that connect body, places, vision and that the Identity
expresses itself through the plots created from these connections.
In my work this complex plot translates into image, object, gesture and in a reflection that
questions the relationship between photography, movement and storytelling.
4- Klim Kutsevskyy
During the last year and a half, I've asked strangers to share with me autoproduced photos and videos, explicit or not explicit materials, the most genuine and sincere as possible: in a few words I've asked them a product of their own ego.
In a similar dimension of the self-exhibition I intervened by combining everything, by switching this material's own nature and in some cases by erasing it.
HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF DISAPPEAR (ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS TUTORIAL)
1) TAKE ON A NEW FORM; INDEED
PERHAPS ALWAYS THE SAME BUT REMODELED, MAKE IT REFLECTIVE, ENVELOP IT IN ITS DISHARMONY.
2) FORGET THAT YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A SUB-PRODUCT OF PERFECTION.
3) MAKE OTHERS' EYES ORBIT AROUND WHAT MAKES YOU RECOGNIZABLE AS YOURSELF, THEN BLIND THEM.
4) SUBJECT YOURSELF TO CONSTANT DISAPPOINTMENTS. MASTURBATE IN FRONT OF AN AUDIENCE OF SPECTATORS WITHOUT HAVING AN ORGASM: THE AUDIENCE OF SPECTATORS WILL. STILL REACH AN ORGASM.
5) MAKE YOURSELF FLEXIBLE, MALLEABLE, CUT THE THORNS WITH A TEN YEAR OLD IKEA KNIFE. IT’LL TAKE A WHILE THE RESULT WILL BE NICE.
6) CLAP YOUR HANDS REPEATEDLY ON YOUR BODY. ARE YOU STARTING TO FEEL YOUR EMPTINESS?
7) YOU DON'T NEED TO BE GOOD AT MAKING YOURSELF MORE FLIRTY,
YOU ARE AND WILL ALWAYS BE JUST A SUM OF PIXELS. CARRY ON.
WELL, IF YOU HAVE FOLLOWED ALL THE STEPS YOU SHOULD NO LONGER BE, OR BE BUT IN A TOTALLY INHOMOGENEOUS, UNCONSCIOUS AND RANDOM FORM. CHEERS!
5- Federica Culotta
Look at yourself in the mirror, what do you see?
Do you recognise you?
Do you feel confused, don’t you? Who wouldn’t be?
Everyday we have the chance to choose who we are. On the social media, inside the video games, on the web.
We try to cover our uncertainties, our cracks with stratifications, overlapping identities that allow us to hide them.
Identities that do not belong to us and that make us feel safe, accomplished in the society but that have, instead, a taste of dissatisfaction and alienation.
We just about feel the obligation to wear another skin.
So let’s put on a mask.
We have been taught that the others will anyway see a lot of sides of us, so why do we have to pretend?
So, what is for me the identity of a person?
I think that the identity shapes itself, in a natural flow and without forcing.
All the external inputs allow it to enrich it by creating unique individuals and not standardised from the common idea of the society.
Just by internalising ourselves we can find out who we are and stop playing a part that does not belong to
us.
6-Luca Baioni
7- Linda Pezzano
On the television, on social media, we see lots of images. Every day. We are constantly being bombarded. Each one of us has got his own reaction while being in front of an image.
It is extremely subjective.
I always thought about Identity as something personal, as something that defines myself in relation to the world that surrounds me, in relation to what I see, compared to what the others see.
Is is something that allows me to make real what I perceive. The light and the water, for example,
they are elusive, they cannot be concretely caught, they slip away from your hands. But they can be held by an image. Those moments stay there, fixed and unchangeable.
In this way they can be delivered to another person, who will experience his own emotion, a
specific sensation. And so on. Through our perceptions we communicate, as distinct individuals, connected by that image, by that moment.
Let’s do an example of a travel. I can see from the window of a car or of an airplane a series of landscapes that move quickly before my eyes. I can see them even if I don’t open my eyes.
In my mind different images flow, different views of what is fixed in my mind.
I make that image mine, I convey it to others. In that image there is my Identity, what I perceived.
Another person could have experienced another perception of the space outside the window: that’s why the Identities can merge, but never overlap.
What surrounds us it’s unique and dissimilar for each one of us.
8- Giorgio Di Noto
Please note that this translation was intentionally made with Google Traslate.
View to that, this might be incorrect.
[...] What is called virtual reality has undoubtedly a general character and in some way it has absorbed the reality, it took its place insofar as in the virtuality everything is the result of an intervention, an object of various operations. So, everything can be realized in fact, even things that were previously opposed to each other: on one hand there was the real world, and on the other hand the unreal, the imaginary, the dream, etc.. In the virtual dimension all of this is absorbed in equal measure, everything is realized, hyper-realized.
At this point the reality as such lose all foundation, really you can say that there are no more references to the real world. And finally everything is somehow programmed or promoted within a "superformula", which is indeed the one of the virtual, the digital technologies and synthesis. It actually happens that at a certain point the real is still in front of us, and we confront ourselves with it, while we do not confront ourselves with the virtual. In the virtual, we immerse ourselves, we dive into the screen. The screen is a place of immersion, and obviously of interactivity, because you can do whatever you want inside it; but in it you are immersed, you no longer have the distance of the gaze, of the reality's own contradiction. Certainly here the dear old contradictions between reality and imagination, true and false, and so on, are in some way sublimated within a space of hyper-reality that incorporates everything, that incorporates everything. [...]
9- Sara Palmieri
“Liquid Nostalgia” by Sara Palmieri
takes its cue from the concept of 'liquid modernity’ by Zygmunt Bauman in which the problem of modern identity is addressed through the metaphor of liquidity, to indicate the transience of any construction in our time, the lack of roots and stability.
While in the modern age everything was given as a solid construction, today every aspect of life can be artificially reshaped: reality has become too flexible to build something stable and lasting over time.
To an idea of 'digital reality' as virtual, infinitely replicable and flexible, I contrast an 'analogue reality', fragile, that ends and dissolves forever once 'submerged'.
It is an invitation to accept the inevitability and non-replicability of existence, recalling some concepts, such as that of 'nostalgia', expressed in the novel Quel che affidiamo al vento (What we entrust to the wind) by Laura Imai Messina, in which people who have lost someone in the Tōhoku tsunami of March 11, 2011, travel from allover Japan to reach a place where, from a cabin with an unconnected phone, they talk to their loved ones in the
afterlife.
Life is loss and rebirth in a continuous cycle, but only by accepting its uncertainty and taking the risk to truly live and in relationship with others we can build solid memories and endure through time.
"(...)She had convinced herself that nostalgia had nothing to do with memory, that one could indeed feel itstrongly only for things of which one had not had direct experience."
(Quel che affidiamo al vento, Laura Imai Messina)
10- Martha Micali
The video is based on the idea that the construction of the identity is a long-term process, that never comes to a veritable conclusion. The definition of the self and the definition of the others live of continuous blendings, constructions and de-constructions. Psychology defines as “Stable Identity Core”, that core of experiences of the first few years of life […]
Starting from that Core, a progressive construction of the identity happens in the person. Through foreign interferences and internalised interferences, through the things that happen to us or that we allow to happen, through making choices or by subtracting them, we understand ourselves and learn to read the traces of what we are or could be. There is a key element in the development of the Identity that is the Relationship. […]
In some way, the reaction to the relationship is what we can call Identity. […]
There aren’t magic formulas for each one of us, instead are the progressive choices we make that define the present of who we are – in the act of making a choice – and the future of who we will be – in the way that choice will be introduced in the perception we have of ourselves. The relational element sheds light on another key problem of the debate. Does the perceived self correspond to the way the others see us? Does it coincide with the ideal Self? Are what we are destined to be or we are what we want to be? The idea of the stable identity core falters: to represent us on the basis of that, would mean having every answer, every certainty, to be fully
aware of our possibilities. I do not think that this is the case. But that we meander in a gradual discovery of that self. By discovering different roles, different representations and self-representations.
Our role is changing according to the relation we are entertaining. Depending on what the other need of us, and on what we need in that specific time. The structure of the identity, then, is re-shaped. […]
We carry ourselves on the web, whatever we think we are, or what we would like to be. The perceived self constantly faces the perception that we have of the others. On the social media the relational element is a conditio sine qua non. What is different from the physical world is the Interface. Outside the Interface is the body […],
inside the Interface is the word, or the image of that body. Even here, as in the world, we make choices on ourselves and on how to present ourselves. One thing I think is interesting is that on the social media, the self practises some kind of social control over himself. This seems to me to be a difference from the outside. In the physical life, excessive social pressures push the subject to feel trapped and lead to the development of non-functional, self-destructive, or anti-functional behaviours. […]
On the social media, this control is applied by every individual to himself, through the constant presentation of the self and through a qualitative and quantitative assessment of their own behaviour, actions or words. The Social areapparently the reflecting mirror of the fear of not be understood, and constantly put the subject under test, with his own agreement.