Steven Aishman

How have digital practices changed the construction of meaning in everyday life? My research investigates the boundaries of the ‘digitization of our existence’ (Claire Bishop) in everyday life through the simultaneous production of visual artworks and a written thesis. The combination of written and visual knowledge, forms a critical theoretical framework comprised equally of both parts.

My examination focuses on the effects of the collapse of the “reader” (along Eco’s semiotic sense), as every user of digital data is explicitly both a reader and a contributor to meaning (eg. a redditor: reader/editor) due to the effects of metadata. On digital platforms like YouTube, every time there is a click on a link, that click is registered in the metadata and that metadata affects the ranking of the link, hence affecting the meaning of the link to future readers. Metadata has been designed so that is impossible to read anything without also directly affecting its meaning, and therefore metadata transforms every reader into a redditor.

My research asks if digital data be modelled as a “city”. If so, can de Certeau’s concepts of “walking in the city” be applied to the Internet to distinguish between the “strategies” of producers and “tactics” of consumers? How is this model complicated by the notion of the redditor, where users of the Internet can be producer/consumers? Extending this metaphor, can digital practices become a site of creative resistance through use of tactics?

The primary method of my research is the tactic of producing digital artwork that examines the everyday. The artwork is comprised of depicting that which is most obvious in my life and actions that are overlooked because they have become habit. My research employs Georges Perec’s method of examining the habitual to map the geography of meaning in my life and in so doing, resists the placement of my life within institutional strategies.

Keywords: practice-based research; redditor; everyday; Perec; de Certeau;