Romeo_Juliet: The hyperlink and profile creation in digital performance

5:38 pm, Thursday, April 09, 2009. I am sitting at my computer. The window next to me is open to outside. Facebook and Gmail are open as tabs on my computer. I open Google Reader place of the Facebook tab. In Google Reader I have 13 new blog entries to read. I follow hyperlinks on none of them.

danah m. boyd defines a social network site as, quote, web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of users with whom they share a connection, (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system, end quote.

I open Adobe Reader, which contains an essay I acquired though a series of searches through NYU’s Bobst library. I entered my user name and password once to obtain the article. In it, Dr. David Beer writes in criticism of danah m. boyd and Nicole Ellison. He states that, quote, [boyd and Ellison] refer, for instance, to [social network sites] as reflecting ‘unmediated social structures’. The question here would be whether we can actually imagine a ‘social structure’ or a ‘situation’ that goes unmediated. End quote. Dr. Beer does not approve of boyd’s reductive use of the term “social network.”

In copying this quote I opened and closed tabs between Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader seven times. I have one new email, forwarded to my Gmail through NYU’s emailing system. I read it, and then archive it. My twitter feed has 8 new tweets, indicated by the green “t” symbol in the lower right hand corner of my internet browser. I glance at them briefly. None are directed towards me.

In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, the two main characters are both teenagers, and they fall in love and commit suicide within a matter of days. A Google search of, quote, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, end quote, yields over three million results. My Twitter feed interrupts by sending my browser forward. I minimize it.

On Wednesday, November 19, 2008, a 19 year old Floridian teenager committed suicide by taking an overdose of the antidepressant drug benzodiazepine. The teenager had threatened suicide previously, and suffered from depression. However, as details concerning his suicide began to hit the media, people were paying attention. From the reports, an estimated fifteen hundred people had watched the teen die through a streaming video linked to Justin.tv, and it was only a full 10 hours later that they called the authorities. The teen took the drugs off of the camera, and lay on his bed—shown on the screen—while onlookers commented on whether or not he had actually taken enough drugs to lead to death. It was not until nearly 12 hours after the streaming video went live that the police arrived, notified by members of the online forum, who eventually became concerned about the unmoving teen. A suicide note from the teen had been posted at a different blog, according to CNN.com.

For my project, I explore the relationship between the user/participant and the hyperlink. The sites that I use are ones that I am familiar with: Google Accounts, Twitter, Facebook and a Blog site.

My connection has gone down. I reset the router, which is downstairs in the kitchen.

For the performance, I am working with two actors: Luke Brewster, a student in Chicago, Illinois and Wesley Ziegler, in Seattle, Washington. Brewster primarily plays the role of Romeo, and Ziegler the role of Mercutio. I play the role of Juliet in the performance, with primary access to her profiles. At no point in the process did the three of us meet together, and aside from one meeting between me and Luke Brewster in Chicago, all of the organizing and rehearsing occurred over the same digital platforms we use for the performance.

The connection is working again. I start to download the latest Decemberists album off of isoHunt. I make a mental note that I need to back up my music to my hard drive tomorrow.

As I read this to you, you are listening to what I say next. You have the agency of choice, but reside within a prescribed construction of a predetermined sensory engagement. You are sitting at the conference and I am speaking. If this were a digital landscape, you would follow my hyperlinks. And, consequently, my line of thinking, however incongruous it may seem.

I save my paper, I Tweet about what I will eat for dinner, I send my brother an email about a song I like. I blog about my day, I update my profile, my status, my photo; I post a link on your wall. This is text or image or hyperlink that will remain in “memory”—not an embodied memory, but rather within the memory of computer hardware.

However, these moments of digital action are not without their counterparts in reality, and my digital self is not unrelated to who I am as a person, nor are they entirely divorced from my physical body.

For the performance, I compose a “script” or “score” which is to be followed by the cast. This score contains directions for action, stating which lines will be posted across which sites, and where the audience will be directed next through the process of hyperlinking. Throughout the play, we sought to maintain the original intention of the text, specifically taking into account the form of each speech. This impacted where we posted various texts, for instance: soliloquies and public addresses are written as blog posts, public discussions over Facebook or Twitter and private discussions within Google, as emails or chat. These private actions were then posted to public sites as a way for the audience to follow the action, in the same way that bloggers frequently post details from their private lives on public forums, blurring the relation between private and public domains.

These digital actions, as they occur, are immediately archive, even as they move out from my fingertips, the moment I hit send, post, save or complete order. We are living inside of our own digital traces.

I open the tab to Facebook. I learn that Logan Mahan’s tongue is dry from licking envelopes, that Charrissa Hauge is working at the library and Mia Wilson misses having freckles and cowboy boots. I do not follow any links beyond the home page.

Within digital performance, particularly Romeo_Juliet, the hyperlink can easily be appropriated as the fetish object. Tying their experience of following the links to previous, embodied encounters with the play, the audience functions as an agent in the telling of the story, watching the pieces come together their own act of creation. Although the pages may have been archived in the past, they do not come into existence for the audience member until he calls them into being with the click of his mouse. The audience member is participant and storyteller, follower and creator. In this regard, the hyperlink has a dual function: it provides boundaries of the action, a prescribed system within which the play is contained, but the hyperlink also allows for the audience to maintain a sense of agency in the action of the play, indulging in what Everett calls the “fetish” of the hyperlink, the promised embodiment of their actions and the agency of choice.

Throughout cybercultural studies, there are countless examples of personal identity formation and participation in the hyperlinking process. SNSs form a bounded wall around the ideas of virtual identity formation, allowing users to enter into a virtual space that prescribes a series of potentials, which, although they can be followed at will by the user, still maintain a sense of order and prescription to the a virtual social interaction. Digital performance within these sites can both expand into this prescription and allow audience members to participate in the action of a dramatic text, becoming voluntary actors in the creation of a performance. The SNS performance, then, can open up the questioning of audience/participant/user/performer interactions within the digital space, and how these ideas of identity formation and agency can impact one’s journey through the conjoined landscapes of un/mediation.

I sign off, I shut down; I go do the dishes for a while. However, there is little possibility of escaping my digital trace in any permanent fashion; I depend on it for my identity formation as one depends on image, on memory and on perception as means of interacting with the world.

On April 18, 2009, we perform the digital action of Romeo and Juliet, beginning at the site: digitalperformative.blogspot.com. The duration of the action is about three hours and twenty minutes.

My phone beeps, the emails roll in; someone sends me a tweet, a wall post, a possibility for interaction and I willingly accept. I am, after all, a participant and actor, a follower and an observer, deeply embedded into this bounded system, the system of the hyperlink.

Thank you.

It Tastes Like Blood, Sweat and Tears. . .

. . . But that's another thesis project, mostly revolving around Kristeva and Sedgwick. Maybe in some other life.

After a grueling two day seminar, the semester, and, consequently, the year, are almost drawing to a close. I have a scene presentation on Monday, (drop me a line if you are in NYC and want to come see it) but that's really about it, aside from a few rehearsals. And then the parents arrive, the graduation happens and I am left with the great huge void of what the hell to do next. But it's okay. Ah, but seriously, if you have a job in the city, let me know.

I was going to post a few things: my thesis paper, for one, which is both lengthy and the result of a great deal of hard work. But I'm sending the abstract in for publication, and from what I hear tell the don't look too fondly on previously published work. If you want a look at it, let me know and I'll gladly send a copy. It's about the role of the hyperlink and profile creation in digital performance practice, and how that impacts the agency/predestination of an online/digital dis/embodied audience.

I am posting what I read at the seminar today-- an exploration of the Romeo_Juliet project that seeks to aurally imitate the hyperlinking process, dealing with some of the theory and process behind it. I won an award for it, (yeah!) so it must not be that bad. If you want to get the full effect, then you should read it outloud with the lights turned very low, and make a few jokes before hand about how you are not using a powerpoint because you don't trust technology.

Also, and again, thanks to my two performers with this project: Wes and Luke, who were fantastic. Thanks also to my work group and Michelle, whose questions were invaluable as I got lost deep in my technological bubble.

Enjoy, and drop me an email at kate.f.neff at gmail dot com if you want the longer paper.