Life Writing in the Internet Age Miranda July and the Limits of Art as Social Practice Nassim Balestrini Drawing on theories in American Studies, life writing, visual arts, and media studies, this essay explores how artists dedicated to egalitarianism experience the limits of Internet-based participatory art. Through multimedia life writing, ―indie‖ artist Miranda July critically reflects on her own artistic idealism and its rootedness in American myths of emotionally fulfilling social relationships fostered by progressive technology. The American multimedia artist Miranda July (b. 1974), who emerged from the 1990s independent art scene in Portland, Oregon, and who received prizes for her first full-length film (Me and You and Everyone We Know, 2005) and her short story collection (No One Belongs Here More Than You, 2007), has been both vilified as a self-centered ‗hipster‘ and praised as an ‗indie‘ artist. 1 As July works in analogue and digital media, and as she addresses individual and shared experiences in physical and virtual realities, understanding her recent œuvre contributes valuable insights into the social consequences of living inside and outside digitally mediated contexts. Through negotiating power relations in mediated and unmediated human encounters, July probes and critiques the politics of her artistic convictions. Her indie-artist ethos - which she understands as promoting egalitarianism by foregrounding the lives of marginalized individuals - highlights a set of conflicted relations implicit in her medial choices. July‘s online art project Learning to Love You More (2002-2009; hereafter LTLYM), initiated in collaboration with American visual artist Harrell Fletcher (b. 1967), shifts agency from traditional artist-audience relations to relations among participants in digitized exchanges. This socially mo- 1 Compare Koppel and the website www.ihatemirandajuly.tumblr.com to Onstad and various sources referenced in this paper. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 40 (2015) · Heft 1-2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Nassim Balestrini 128 tivated empowerment of Web users realized July and Fletcher‘s desire to allow diverse, previously unheard voices to surface in digital communication. 2 Contrasting with this optimistic outlook, July‘s feature film The Future (February 2011) and her monograph It Chooses You (July 2011) address how digital media detrimentally affect perspectives on oneself and others. July concludes that, although she has repeatedly harnessed technology to facilitate conversations about its effects on mind and spirit, digital media undermine her socially oriented art because she, as an artist transforming others‘ experiences into marketable products, unwittingly positions herself within a problematic hierarchy. July‘s recent work is highly topical because it demonstrates that the purportedly egalitarian politics of her art cannot easily withstand the personal challenges of human interaction outside digitally mediated contexts. Despite the possibilities of online self-presentation and interaction, digital forums can create deceptively impersonal exchanges and exclude more people than intensive Web users may acknowledge. As LTLYM and It Chooses You rely on life writing and both employ and address digital communication, comparative analyses of these works plumb the depths of the crises July experiences (as an artist, individual, and partner in a relationship) and their relevance for contemporary imaginaries of the Internet and its implications. Whereas LTLYM optimistically envisions linking people through virtual communication, The Future and It Chooses You critique idealizations of the Internet‘s potential for individual and social change. The seeming risk involved in initiating and curating a participatory website - a risk grounded in the unpredictability of random users‘ contributions - is ironically dwarfed by July‘s volatile experience as screenplay writer, film director, and book author. Unexpectedly, interacting with individuals outside digital mediation makes her question the postulates of the more obvious positions of control over her own work as filmmaker and author as well as the ideally ‗uncontrolled‘ features of open-access LTLYM. The Future and It Chooses You show that, first, individuals who consider themselves part of digital media-dominated socioeconomic environments can lose touch with reality by relying on digital communication and digital self-definition; second, they illustrate the corollaries of abstaining from habitual Internet use and of interacting with individuals who do not practice online immersion. July‘s self-definition as an artist inclined towards equality and democracy pivots on her ability to mediate between her Web-dominated social environment and the world of people (and potential objects of artistic scrutiny) who do not have access to this environment but who - according to her outlook - should be included in her artistic purview. In a wider 2 All LTLYM references are accessible at www.learningtoloveyoumore.com and http: / / www.sfmoma.org/ explore/ collection/ artwork/ 134671. Life Writing in the Internet Age 129 sense, July‘s works emblematize the necessity to ponder social relations within and outside digital mediation as being more complex than polemicized dichotomies (such as analogue/ digital, real/ virtual, producer/ consumer) suggest. Intersections between recent concerns shared by American studies, life writing, art theory, and media studies inform this discussion of the cultural imaginary at the root of Miranda July‘s art. Particularly the unresolved tensions between the emotional and rational components of her perspective on others, which lead her to rethink her attitude toward the Internet and toward her own artistic understanding of ‗authenticity‘ and ‗reality,‘ resonate with current debates about art, digital media, and sociopolitical agency in contemporary America. Life Writing, Art, and Media Criticism The fact that the Internet has created new options for self-expression challenges Americanists to contemplate digital communication as possessing its own cultural poetics, embedded in a both localized and globalized world. July accepts the same challenge as an artist addressing the Internet‘s role in her own life and in the lives of other real persons and fictional characters. Since the 1990s, American studies scholars have been highlighting processes and interdependencies in the study of cultural history (Radway 2002, Rowe 2000, Levander/ Levine 2008). Rather than validating extant social and cultural hierarchies, research seeks to understand culture as a dynamic matrix of forces that potentially corrupt the conceptualization and practice of liberty and other Enlightenment ideals (in all their interpretative breadth), that is, of ideals which still fire the imaginations of participants in and observers of American society (Giles 2006, Traister 2010). The very definition of terms like democracy determines assessments as to how Web-based life writing and art as well as Web-based social interaction in a wider sense foster or inhibit the realization of such ideals. Current scholarly conversations within life writing studies, art criticism, and media studies single out this core issue. Hierarchy and agency figure prominently in attempts to theorize online life writing, as in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson‘s suggestion to discuss it in terms of ―self-expression and self-help,‖ ―self-dramatizing,‖ ―voyeurism‖, and the slippery slope between ―authenticity‖ and a mere ―authenticity effect‖ (cf. Smith/ Watson 2010: 184; also see Arthur 2009: 74-75). They associate online life narrative with three current areas of interest, ―performativity, positionality, and relationality‖ (Smith/ Watson 2010: 214; also see Smith 2011: 566) which focus on performative identity choices, varying subject positions, and acts of perceiving one‘s life through another‘s life rather than identifying as the comparatively insular individual of Enlightenment-inspired autobiographies (Eakin 2008: 31, 50). Performative and relational life writing nevertheless includes ―identi- Nassim Balestrini 130 ty protocols‖ (23) which constrain narratives because societies protective of individuality impose their own normative emplotments and thus inhibit self-directedness (32). As transgressions against such norms tend to be judged morally, Eakin ―conclude[s] that ethics is the deep subject of autobiographical discourse‖ (50). In my view, ethics is equally central to life writing-related art aimed at realizing Enlightenment ideals and to the criticism of life writing that questions normative ―personhood.‖ Furthermore, the disembodied quality of online life writing highlights the potential for hoaxes and self-inventions (e.g., in terms of gender and ethnicity) and thus interrogates the ethics of contemporary modes of producing and consuming life writing at all (cf. Eakin 1999: 4, Whitlock/ Poletti 2008: xv, Egan 2010). Linked subjectivities, as in constructing one‘s story through a loved one‘s life (Eakin 2008), also inform Nicolas Bourriaud‘s theory of ―relational aesthetics‖ within the artist-work-recipient nexus. Discussing art of the 1990s, he argues that each individual‘s interpretation of art creatively produces meaning and knowledge. While art has always depended on periodically redefined human relations (Bourriaud 2002: 14, 26), some artists elevate relationality to the extent that ―inter-subjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art (…) but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice‖ (22) (cf. Rebentisch 2007: 64). 3 ―[M]odels of sociability‖ (Bourriaud 2002: 28) inherent in specific works segue into ―relational microterritories‖ (33) (cf. Larsen 2006: 172- 83 esp. 172, Glissant 2006: 75, 78, Goldenberg/ Reed 2008: n. pag., Nesbit/ Obrist/ Tiravanija 2006: 186). Bourriaud does not discuss online relationality but uses audio/ audiovisual works and the Internet as central tropes for ―modes of production‖ (Bourriaud 2010: 8). He regards ―(…) DJs, Web surfers, and postproduction artists‖ as ―‗semionauts‘ who produce original pathways through signs‖ (18). Although Bourriaud postulates that recombining preexisting materials counteracts master narratives and guarantees what he calls heteroglot art (46, 94) and while his pathfinding concept dismantles the dualism of active producers and passive consumers, he does not take into account new hierarchies of leaders and followers. 4 Analyzing the Internet as a virtual and openly accessible locale for down-/ uploading by individuals (who are not obliged to reveal their names or physical whereabouts to online readers) broadens the debate toward social contexts beyond art production and reception. Both process-focused relational art and the sociopolitical implications of Bourriaud‘s online interactions are relevant because July and Fletcher are 3 Likewise, media historians reject ―the strict dichotomy of production and consumption‖ (Gitelman 2004: 61, also see Boddy 2004: 191, Trend 2001: 4). 4 Schorgl includes Bourriaud in her reading of LTLYM, but neither she nor other researchers provide sustained discussions of July‘s work in light of relationality. Life Writing in the Internet Age 131 socially oriented professional artists while LTLYM participants predominantly are non-artist Web users. Celebrating relational art as politically laudable and empowering demonstrates a dilemma which plagues both July and scholars in the disciplines discussed in this section. Claire Bishop finds that while Bourriaud ―equate[s] aesthetic judgment with an ethicopolitical judgment of the relationships produced by a work of art,‖ he fails to suggest criteria for assessing such relationships (Bishop 2004: 65, cf. Fowle/ Larsen 2005: 20). By assuming that relationality is ―intrinsically democratic‖ (67), he excludes art-induced antagonisms. Bishop also wonders whether stressing ethical, harmonious artist-perceiver relations undermines relationality per se by making it a prime object of commercial and political cooptation (Barok 2009: 2, 3). 5 That is, if relational art produces feel-good experiences, it will be marketed as bringing people together in enjoyable environments and it will attract governmental funding for art that fosters social cohesion. Similar to the murky politics of an ―authenticity effect‖ in life writing, relational art would thus lose its integrity. Media studies shares the concern with an anti-hierarchical plurality of coexisting factors characteristic of context-oriented American studies, life writing scholarship, and relational aesthetics. Instead of proclaiming the high hopes or the dire predictions of populist polemics regarding the Internet‘s cultural effects (cf. Keen 2012, Lunenfeld 2011), Qvortrup asserts that the digital age has produced ―a networks society‖ (Qvorthrup 2012: 248) featuring the Web as one network among many. Jenkins, too, suggests neither to presuppose that media consumers are ―coopt[ed]‖ through consuming content provided by media conglomerates nor that media participation unfailingly expresses ―audience resistance‖ (Jenkins 2012: 222). Just as Jenkins ponders concrete effects of economic power and specific media user behaviors, Dahlgren suggests replacing the Habermasian ‗public sphere‘ with multiple ―civic cultures‖ (Dahlgren 2012: 132) constituted by ―structure‖ (e.g., Internet access), ―representation‖ (media content disseminated to specific recipients), and ―interaction‖ (133). Not only does Dahlgren consider economic factors along with semiotic and sociopolitical implications of what is broadcast, consumed, and discussed, but he also stresses that ―interaction‖ applies to encountering and to discussing media content; thus, scholars should study the ―circulation of meaning‖ (133-34). These claims are relevant to July‘s works because multiple ―civic cultures‖ allow coexisting discourses (such as ―the affective, the poetic, the humorous, the ironic‖ [143]) rather than, as in a 5 To Bourriaud, ―the artist models and disseminates disconcerting situations‖ (Bourriaud 2002: 31) and ―[a]rt (…) is no longer seeking to represent utopias‖ (46). Shared disciplinary concerns surface here since Bishop‘s outlook parallels the perceived voyeurism in trauma narratives (Smith 2011: 568-69, Schaffer/ Smith 2004). Nassim Balestrini 132 singular ‗public sphere,‘ only the discourse of ―deliberative democracy‖ based on intellectual reasoning (see Lievrouw 2011: 214, who roots digital-media activism in the aesthetics of movements like ―Dada and Situationism‖). Whether online ―civic cultures‖ will become ―action-scapes‖ (Broeckmann 1999: 441) productive of political opinions remains to be assessed in each particular context. Dahlgren‘s inclusion of ―cultural factors‖ in political agency is particularly apt for studying life writing posted on LTLYM because participants engage in performative acts in which positionality (cf. Smith/ Watson 2010, Eakin 2008) marks either assuming or relinquishing agency. Consequently, relational structures in LTLYM invite scrutiny as ―civic cultures‖ (Dahlgren 2012) or ―relational microterritories‖ (Bourriaud 2010). Since LTLYM is a curated website aimed at empathy-focused interaction (not only between website creators and users, but also among the latter), power relations, conceptions of freedom, and potentially competing notions of egalitarianism and democracy are at stake. How then does this Internet project, which emanated from art as social practice, balance tolerance-based heterogeneity with ―minimal shared commitments to the vision and procedures of democracy, which in turn entails a capacity to see beyond the immediate interests of one‘s own group‖ (Dahlgren 2012: 145)? Is the politicized ethics of LTLYM subject to the criticism Bishop levels at Bourriaud? As the following discussion of LTLYM demonstrates, July envisions art, be it analogue or digital, as offering aesthetic and affective tools to negotiate the psychological and social effects of technology. In her post-LTLYM work, her personal sensitivities then unpredictably interfere with transforming sociopolitical ideals into viable art. Learning to Love You More In audio monologues, videos, full-length films, short stories, photographs, and sculptures, July consistently emphasizes communication. 6 She explains: ―We don‘t know how to reconcile spirituality with technological progress and growth, and as a nation we don‘t acknowledge that this is a problem or even a topic. (…) It certainly gives me a sense of urgency; I want to create room for [such a] conversation‖ (Bryan-Wilson 2007: 195; also see Dodson/ Barnett et al 2011, Elmhirst 2011, Onstad 2011). Fletcher, a visual artist and professor of Art and Social Practice, expresses a 6 Regarding her multimedia works, see Taubin; Chang; Cote; Scott, ―Video as Art.‖ On her 2005 film, see Halter; Johnson; Scott, ―An Artistic Eye Wide Open‖ and ―Young Filmmaker‖; Thomson; Rabin. Her non-video art is discussed in Hall; Maak; ―Miranda July.‖ For her short stories, see Balestrini. Visitors ‗completed‘ July‘s participatory sculptures at the 2009 Venice Biennale by using them as photo spots (―Miranda July‖ n. pag.). Life Writing in the Internet Age 133 similar desire: ―People often asked how I‘m able to entice random strangers into working with me on art projects about their own lives. (…) As it turns out, people really like to be paid attention to. (…) I have formed collaborations with people to produce exhibitions and public art projects about aspects of their lives that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, sometimes even by themselves‖ (Fletcher 2002: n. pag.) . Intent on fostering discussion of social issues, July contemplates technology‘s effects while Fletcher encourages autobiographical self-expression. A hallmark of conceptual art and art as social practice, their curatorial function in LTLYM resembles the impetus provided by a life-writing ―coaxer,‖ that is, by ―any person or institution or set of cultural imperatives that solicits or provokes people to tell their stories‖ (Smith/ Watson 2010: 64). 7 Although July and Fletcher mastermind the interactive website, they reserve the floor for online participants. But, according to Jörgen Svensson, even exchange-based art focused on ―an opportunity for increased communication‖ (59) may position the artist as generous giver above the viewerparticipant as grateful recipient (47). Svensson‘s assessment implicitly confirms Dahlgren‘s assumption of culturally ingrained power structures. Aware of the traditionally asymmetrical artist-audience relation, July and Fletcher created an online realm for performative, relational, and positional creative expression guided by rules meant to protect the participants‘ rights. The project archive‘s 2010 acquisition by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art bespeaks its acceptance in the art world. As art as social practice, LTLYM transcends confessional or self-help websites. Problems nevertheless arise when the online project spills over or rather back into the offline world. This circumstance prefigures July‘s qualms about overly optimistic views on the social inclusivity of digital uploading and downloading. In the preface to their 2007 LTLYM book, Fletcher and July anticipate being perceived as towering artist-figures: ―Sometimes it seems like the moment we let go of trying to be original, we actually feel something new - which was the whole point of being artists in the first place‖ (Fletcher/ July 2007: n. pag.). While they critique timeworn Romantic notions of genius and originality, they do not characterize everyone as a born artist. 8 Rather, the ―complex world‖ of their online project reflects ―the frequently wild, sometimes hilarious, and quietly stunning creative lives of a few people living on Earth right now‖ (n. pag.). Between May 2002 and May 2009, more than 8,000 individuals uploaded ―reports‖ in response to up to 70 ―assignments‖ posted on learn- 7 July‘s Joanie4Jackie video chain letter for women, initiated in the mid-1990s, prefigures her role in LTLYM (Ingram et al. 134; Hilderbrand 195-223). 8 Fletcher rejects Beuys‘s claim that all individuals are artists (―Some Thoughts‖ [n. pag.]). Regarding alternatives to the ―lone artist‖ stereotype, see Fischer and Vassen. Nassim Balestrini 134 ingtoloveyoumore.com. 9 Assignments required artisanal dexterity and creative acts (like writing, drawing, building, sewing, sculpting, producing photographs, audio, or video recordings) and other types of expertise (like gardening, health-related advice, and technological skills). Some comprised several steps: 1) create something material like a drawing; 2) find a ‗real-world‘ location in a private or public place; 3) photograph the drawing in this very location; 4) upload the digital image. 10 Participants engaged in self-scrutiny and social interaction. They used (offline) physical materials and environments, as well as analogue and digital tools. Although numerous assignments encouraged autobiographical selfdepiction (including confessional components), July and Fletcher did more than provide detailed instructions and an online space for sharing life writing. Relationality-oriented assignments challenged respondents to represent elements in self-depictions of a person they will most likely never meet face to face. Besides overcoming geographic distance, such relationality through digital communication experiments with positionality and performativity, even with multi-positionality, as in assignments in which respondents try to experience another life writer‘s emotions, thus taking the ―intersubjective act‖ (Smith/ Watson 2010: 26) of life narrative literally. As relationally oriented assignments require collaborating with and/ or presenting one‘s work to relatives, friends, or strangers, such online communication presupposes offline ―civic cultures‖ (to use Dahlgren‘s concept). Whenever the uploader presents others, s/ he assumes the agency of the coaxer/ mediator, but foregrounds the presented other(s), as in assignment No. 2, ―Make a neighborhood field recording,‖ which showcases not the ethnographer but the singers s/ he recorded. 11 More strikingly, LTLYM envisions in-depth interpretation of someone else‘s report. For so-called ―piggy-backing‖ assignments such as No. 19, ―Illustrate a scene or make an object from Paul Arensmeyer‘s life story,‖ a Web user must first read Arensmeyer‘s response to No. 14, ―Write your life story in less than a day,‖ in order to translate a verbal description into a different 9 This structure recalls American high-school instruction and self-help publications (cf. Julia Cameron‘s The Artist‟s Way, a bestseller since 1992). Compare Dezeuze‘s criticism to Stasko‘s positive assessment (212, 214) of this LTLYM characteristic. Regarding the numbers, see http: / / www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/ hello/ index.php. To Hansson et al., LTLYM exemplifies ―crowd-sourcing‖ (n. pag.). 10 http: / / www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/ displays/ index.php. Also see Gibson Yates 34. Besides the 2007 book, art museums, galleries, schools, senior citizen centers, as well as spin-off websites, film festivals, and radio shows featured LTLYM ―reports.‖ 11 Other variants are documenting other people‘s relations (No. 39, ―Take a picture of your parents kissing‖) or ―recreat[ing] a feeling that someone else had‖ (No. 13, ―Recreate the moment after a crime‖). Life Writing in the Internet Age 135 medium. 12 The conscious effort not to misrepresent Arensmeyer‘s depiction acknowledges that artistic agency equals power. Positionality also functions to counterbalance hierarchy in No. 65, ―Perform the phone call someone else wished they could have,‖ as the instructions demand: ―Try to be faithful to the emotional tone of the original dialogue.‖ Such instructions emphasize LTLYM‘s incentive to ―bring people together and give them a new way to feel something‖ (Fletcher/ July 2007: 155). 13 This intersubjective focus of emotional novelty coheres with Bourriaud‘s ―relational aesthetics‖ in which sampling and editing of pre-existing content expresses social relations (cf. Bourriaud 2010). LTLYM assignments also drive home Eakin‘s point that relationality explodes the Enlightenment myth of individual autonomy (Eakin 1999: 43-98, cf. Smith/ Watson 2010 ) because life writing that includes another person‘s auto/ biography undermines the self-other dichotomy (Eakin 1999: 58) and because appropriating the other‘s story asserts narratorial command (61). The innovative potential of LTLYM resides in gearing this appropriation not towards self-reflection but towards intersubjectivity; additionally, the assignments may require face-to-face encounters. The ―relational microterritor[ies]‖ of LTLYM thus alternate between offline relations and virtual online closeness which overcomes geographical distance. Is LTLYM then only a seemingly egalitarian forum that prevents real exchange among strangers and that rather promotes its own normative personhood (cf. Smith/ Watson 2010: 186, Smith 2011: 668; regarding the partisan misuse of the term ‗democracy,‘ cf. Dean 2010: 84)? Does it trigger standardized narratives whose voyeurism confirms entrenched power relations (Smith 2011: 568-69)? What about economic factors regarding online access (571)? 14 As a curated project, LTLYM must be approached within an art historical context, 15 but whether intersubjectively exploring emotions produced normative narratives - either because the website attracted a homogeneous user group or because the curators were reluctant to display certain self-depictions - remains hard to gauge (cf. Schiller 1995: 163, Chatfield 2012: 122-23). 16 The danger of evoking stereotypical responses (rather than encouraging independent thinking and, thus, individual and social change) surfac- 12 July speaks of ―piggy-backing‖ in http: / / www.sfmoma.org/ explore/ multimedia/ videos/ 481. 13 This parallels 1960s situationist art intended ―to produce new social relationships and thus new social realities‖ (Bishop, ―Introduction‖ 13). 14 Kroker and Weinstein predict that the Internet‘s egalitarian potential will succumb to service providers‘ monetary interests (Kroker/ Weinstein 1994: 149). 15 LTLYM evokes Rancière‘s ―‗third way‘ of a micro-politics of art‖ relying ―on a game of exchanges and displacements between the world of art and that of non-art‖ (86). 16 See responses to assignments No. 34 and No. 59 in the online archive and in Fletcher and July. Nassim Balestrini 136 es, for instance, in narratives of suffering. 17 One example offers striking evidence for both the possibility of offline interaction resulting from online life writing and the possibility of voyeurism. Laura Lark‘s response to No. 14, ―Write your life story in less than a day,‖ spawned assignment No. 22, ―Recreate a scene from Laura Lark‘s life story.‖ Furthermore, the book based on LTLYM includes an essay in which Lark mentions her subsequent artistic collaboration with Fletcher. Lark‘s report on No. 14, a harrowing description of growing up in a disintegrating family fraught with financial difficulties, concludes more brightly with becoming an artist and getting married. The fact that the instructions for No. 22 characterize her ―amazing story‖ as ―a classic American tale‖ (Fletcher/ July 2007: 152) confirms the perennial popularity of ―fantasies of the selfmade individual overcoming adversity‖ at the core of ―the contemporary culture of self-help‖ because they provide ―models for conversion, survival, and self-transformation‖ (Smith/ Watson 2010: 124). Simultaneously, Lark‘s LTLYM participation highlights the concerns of art as social practice. But are culturally ingrained emplotments of ‗American lives‘ compatible with transcending the curator-respondent divide? Ideally, socially oriented art provides what Ted Purves calls a gift - in this case, an online platform inviting self-expression. In contrast to Svensson‘s cautioning against hierarchical artist-participant relations, Purves characterizes gifts as ―token[s] through which social relationships are forged, managed and preserved‖ (Purves 2004: 31). Participants who responded to numerous LTLYM assignments over the years established a long-term bond. Open access (at least for those who can go online) permits more ―than minimum social values to flourish‖ (38) to the extent that collaborative art can be ―life changing‖ (42). Purves‘s vision of ―a spirit of exchange and equality that perhaps can be seen as the hope of a gift in its truest form‖ (43) thus unhinges arguments against curated participatory websites as necessarily hierarchical and short-lived. Lark‘s exceptional collaboration with Fletcher outside the virtual realm notwithstanding, I would argue that LTLYM relocates egalitarian notions of intersubjective exchange from traditional artist-viewer relationships to relationships that respondents to assignments or readers of reports voluntarily enter without predetermined spatial or temporal limitations. Assignments frequently require withdrawing from the computer, entering the non-virtual world, and communicating with other human beings. Potentially, responses to reports may initiate abiding relations (cf. Colman 2005: 16-17). By decentering relationality from the (still hierarchical) artist-viewer nexus, LTLYM adheres to its dictum that art facilitates new emotional experiences for whoever chooses to seek them. 17 Life stories full of violence and tragedy ―position readers as secondary witnesses (…)‖ (Smith 2011: 568); consumers‘ interest in certain narratives depends on the place and time of consumption, and on marketing strategies (569). Life Writing in the Internet Age 137 Showcasing Lark‘s report as ―a classic American tale‖ remains problematic, since it focuses on the emplotment rather than its sociopolitical underpinnings. The understanding of agency promoted by LTLYM thus applies to producers and consumers alike. Assignment respondents undermine outdated notions of originality because completing the same tasks as others does not hamper their self-expression. Participating in what Dahlgren calls ―representation‖ and ―interaction‖ (Dahlgren 2012: 133) on a website contributes to ―circulation of meaning‖ (134). Significantly, LTLYM combines offline and online interaction through multi-step and ―piggybacking‖ assignments, and through access to the reports. As participants in this ―civic culture‖ or ―relational microterritory,‖ respondents decide how to negotiate prevailing norms of selfhood and social bonds; recipients select what they view and to what they respond. 18 Judging by the sheer number and the partial interrelatedness of responses, the Web project achieved its social-practice goals, even if interactivity per se does not preclude hierarchical relations (Arata 2004: 223). Arata regards interactivity as an alternative to teleology; but what happens when interactivity has a specific goal? While, in the case of LTLYM, the abstract goal - new intersubjective emotional experiences - turns uploaders and viewers into ―semionauts‖ in Bourriaud‘s sense, we must further evaluate the hierarchical implications of the curator-collaborator relation (also see Poster 1997: 260, 263). The Artist’s Doubts LTLYM attracted numerous users and has been archived as socially oriented art. July‘s engagement with the Internet in subsequent works reveals her continued concern with how digital communication impacts individuals and relationships. In LTLYM, new feelings are shared when offline experiences are represented online, often implying that one will experience a sense of relief upon revealing something. More recently, July‘s relief yields to dismay at being confronted with people without recourse to the protective computer screen and glance-determining mouse-click. Set in contemporary Los Angeles, the film The Future portrays Sophie and Jason, a couple in their mid-30s. Stung by the thought that they have reached the mid-point of their lives without having lived consciously and fully, they temporarily abandon their Internet-dominated lifestyle, hoping to gain a better grip on meaningful existence. 19 In It Chooses You July 18 An email link allowed readers to contact Lark. For another life-changing response to No. 14, see [Russell, Jacinda]. 19 On technological prowess inhibiting independent thinking, see Ross 1998: 356, 363. Nassim Balestrini 138 chronicles her struggle with the screenplay for The Future. She contemplates her artistic renderings of her own and others‘ lives in a digital media-saturated social environment. Unable to overcome writer‘s block, July began to call and subsequently interview residents of Los Angeles who placed classified ads in the weekly Penny Saver. Her book interweaves these conversations (and photographs by Brigitte Sire) with confessional passages on art, love, and death, and on her endeavor to fathom Penny Saver advertisers. Compassion for the predominately socially marginalized interviewees alternates with momentary disgust at their lives and ideas. July‘s frank discussion of her reactions exemplifies the voyeurism involved in conducting interviews in the presence of a photographer and a male escort, and in publishing (and thus selling) these texts and images (July 2011: 146-59, esp. 157). Her limited capacity to connect with individuals far removed from her own social circle shocks July who has focused a considerable amount of her attention as a writer and multimedia artist on the not-so-accepted and frequently awkward in contemporary America. It is crucial that July contextualizes her writer‘s block within her Internet-dominated lifestyle (July 2011: 6-7) and that she finds it progressively harder to ‗learn to love herself more.‘ Assuming that the Web inhibits her artistic endeavors, she addresses the downside of a phenomenon that, in LTLYM, promised empowerment. The Future demonstrates that turning your back on the online world will end senseless browsing, downloading, and uploading, but cannot answer questions about life (cf. Lévy 1997: 258, Turkle 2011: 293-94). Does the self-help incentive of LTLYM, thus, retain its significance only whenever it creates social relations beyond media consumption? July‘s Penny Saver interviews portray strangers remote from the technologically privileged who have the means to retreat into interconnected, yet solipsistic digital realms (July 2011: 57). The Future critiques digital self-assertion (particularly through Sophie‘s failed project of uploading a series of dance videos on YouTube) and accentuates challenges of digitally mediated and nonvirtual relationships. It Chooses You exposes the unpredictability of encounters with strangers and thus problematizes LTLYM‘s incentive to bring people together and to feel something new. The participatory website allows more controlled and thus comfortable/ ing interaction than immediate (and possibly more ‗authentic‘ or ‗real‘) communication with unfamiliar individuals. July‘s autocritical narrative of digital immersion coheres with Bishop‘s criticism of Bourriaud, namely that ―relational aesthetics‖ turn a blind eye to the sociopolitical reality of conflict. Ethical assessments of the artist-work-viewer/ participant relation also figure in discussions of cliquish Web ‗communities‘ established through online interactivity and in debates about artist-curators as facilitators who remain more powerful Life Writing in the Internet Age 139 than amateurs involved in collaborative projects. 20 On the part of largely anonymous Web users, Internet-mediated social relations assume an antiseptic air because users can enter and leave this world at will without considering others (Turkle 2011: 238, Dean 2010: 79). It Chooses You demonstrates that unmediated personal encounters (in contrast to uploaded words, sounds, and images) require social skills that far exceed consuming LTLYM reports. The emotional range of July‘s interview experiences illustrates the shortcomings of simple dichotomies (like virtual vs. real) and their purported sociopolitical implications. For instance, immediate and intense sense impressions in a real-life encounter trigger July‘s desire to check her email on her iPhone ―to take a little time-out‖ (July 2011: 98). Following her conversation with a breeder of wild animals that strike July as noisy and smelly, July juxtaposes ―the fullness of her [the animal breeder‘s] life‖ with her own desire ―for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes [her, i.e., July] feel useful, or feel anything at all‖ (99). Similarly, her interview with a former prison inmate monitored by an anklet makes her realize the distinction between understanding others and only evoking the impression of doing so (125). Her crumbling performance as a socially engaged artist thus calls into question a central tenet of LTLYM: the supposed benefit of ―tr[ying] to feel the reality of‖ (Fletcher/ July 2007: 143) another person‘s life. When interviewing strangers, this endeavor collides with her deficiency in spontaneously stomaching Otherness. Feeling jeopardized by o/ Others, she wonders whether reliance on digital media curbs ―the scope of what [she] could feel and imagine‖ (July 2011: 160) and bars her from noticing people living outside the Web. While she critiques potentially shallow Internet blogs as opposed to seemingly authentic oral narration in a conversation (160), she acknowledges that compassion for an interlocutor will not suffice for establishing long-term friendship (157). Thus, broad idealizations or rejections of digitally (un)mediated emotional and social relations lead nowhere. Here it is seminal to recall that LTLYM addresses the purportedly ―fragile‖ relations established by computer-networked communication (Heim 1994: 81) because numerous assignments invite people to connect with others personally and even to go public in the abstract sense of choosing a location for an object before posting a report online. The frequently central function of the physical world not only forces contributors away from their computers, but moving to/ within specific offline locales grants access to parts of LTLYM even to those who cannot go 20 See Trend, Reading, Part IV. Arning characterizes the shift from the adulated omnipotent artist to the artist as ―catalyst for a set of stimulating relationships that make up the art experience‖ (12). Gerhards and Schäfer discuss how search engines favor existing economic and political powers (148, 153, 155-56). Also see Browne. Nassim Balestrini 140 online. As assignment respondents select locales and collaborators (e.g., individuals included in recordings and individuals likely to witness a display), they emphasize intersubjectivity in Bourriaud‘s sense. LTLYM creates virtual and partially non-virtual ―relational microterritories,‖ but in It Chooses You it becomes clear that July‘s inability to extricate herself physically from interaction with strangers in unfamiliar environments forces her to reexamine the assumed comfort of online interactivity (July 2011: 132). Although The Future is not an open-access online video but a full-length film marketed to cinemas and on DVD, its mediality as well as its surreal details remove it from physical reality and make it ‗virtual‘ and fictional. Instead of presenting the physical world as more genuine and thus better, The Future and It Chooses You imply that ‗real‘/ ‗authentic‘ and ‗virtual‘ features feed into each other and that each experience and all of its components must be evaluated separately. The irony of finding the key to completing her screenplay and her film among her Penny Saver interviewees highlights both July‘s desire to relinquish artistic agency temporarily and the discomfort of not being in control. It Chooses You oscillates between crediting human doings or mere chance with how July found her interviewees and with how they affected her work (July 2011: 59, 160). Shaking the foundations of the activepassive dualism is part and parcel of reconsidering her relation to physical and digitized virtual realities (98, 159), and her understanding of reality and fiction (139, 160, 199). Intriguingly, July attempts to reconcile her contradictory emotions by suggesting that life should be regarded as a collection of particulars, ―held together only by the fragile memory of one person - or, if you were lucky, two‖ (199). Such a set of (possibly shared and thus relational) memories does not carry predetermined significance but rather resembles ―the most intricate, radical piece of art, the kind of art I was always trying to make. It dared to mean nothing and so demanded everything of you‖ (199). If the act of remembering is performative and relational and if art imitates the workings of memory, then life writing and art become inextricable. The design of It Chooses You and July‘s choice of a publisher convey the same artistic dynamics of significant details set in a partially unstable environment inviting participation and interpretation. The cover‘s retro style reflects her octogenarian interviewee Joe Putterlik‘s pre-computer aesthetics: he integrated homemade bawdy limericks into collages of visuals clipped from magazines (July 201: 182, 184-89). As the stickers on the outside of the book can be removed to reveal what is hidden underneath, each reader (or purchaser, to reintroduce money and access) can change this particular paratext. Writer Dave Eggers‘s publishing house, McSweeney‘s, ―a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources‖ (copyright page), has produced hardcover books with both aesthetic appeal and a mixture of un/ traditional features of printed books (Starre). Bourriaud depicts sampling and DJ-ing as relationally oriented Life Writing in the Internet Age 141 ―mode[s] of production.‖ Putterlik‘s cards and the cover design of It Chooses You follow a comparable trajectory, albeit in a decidedly nondigital format. Thus, the book‘s visual aesthetics underline July‘s realization that, more consciously than in LTLYM, her art fluctuates between established and innovative forms of self-expression for heightened effect. Collected Moments and Shared ‘Realities’ in Contemporary America The comparative analysis of Learning to Love You More and It Chooses You illustrates that performativity and positionality of life writing must be evaluated in light of how digital or analogue media facilitate egalitarian or authoritarian discourses. July‘s doubts regarding empowerment through online participation reveal her artistic ethos; personal encounters with individuals whose lives alienate her sorely test her commitment to conversations among equals. July‘s thought processes culminate in an understanding of ‗authenticity‘ or ‗reality‘ as something that she, as an artist, reassembles into multi-media images which allow her to interpret herself and others as part of a web of complex social relations. 21 Although LTLYM was Web-based, the online art project frequently required uploading documents of non-virtual encounters with friends, family members, or strangers. July and Fletcher thus experimented with ―new communities‖ characterized by ―a processual openness based on temporarily shared interests, or simply on a fortuitous moment of being there at the same time‖ (Möntmann 2011: 70) - a concept reminiscent of Dahlgren‘s multiple ―civic cultures.‖ This perspective on coexisting or sequential momentary communities counterbalances romanticizations of ‗happy digital families‘ and ―replaces unitary and essentialist models of community based on presence, identification, and immanence‖ (70). 22 Rather than projecting momentary communities as fragmentary, LTLYM instrumentalizes them to question normative selfhood by experimenting with processes and contexts productive of specific constellations of individual agency and authoritative social forces. Online assignments yielded explorations of self and other, past and present, individuality and society. Respondents documented relational microterritories outside the digital realm (the way artists exhibit works in the physical world); nonetheless, digital reports potentially encouraged web users to communicate outside the project per se. Life writing in It Chooses You presupposes actual interviewer-interviewee encounters; its mosaic-like structure and photographs evoke multimedia art like Mischa Kuball‘s 100 Lights / 100 Faces (2010), 21 Compare to Virilio: ―a disturbance in the perception of what reality is‖ will ―usher in a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy‖ (Virilio 2001: 24). 22 From a sociopsychological perspective, such a redefinition denies traditional notions of long-term community ties (Turkle 2011: 238-39). Nassim Balestrini 142 based on the life stories of 100 people of 100 different ―immigrant backgrounds‖ (Wappler 2011: 13). In both cases, the artist as facilitator, curator, and compiler provides structure, assumes interpretative agency, and exerts a more palpable authority than displayed in LTLYM. Performativity and positionality raise interrelated concerns and hopes regarding agency, authority, and authenticity (effects). If LTLYM reports do not require verifiable names and locations, how can readers/ viewers/ listeners perceive such self-depictions as genuine? If names and locations were required, how could one assess their authenticity, i.e., evaluate them as convincing examples of verisimilitude (Kitzmann 2003: 60)? Fletcher and July encouraged reports that followed instructions and corresponded with the website‘s goal of feeling things in a new manner and trying to experience someone else‘s emotional world by occupying another individual‘s subject position while subduing one‘s selfish desire to perform. In It Chooses You, July witnesses circumstance-induced performative behaviors that impress her as fake (180) or as ―real‖ (July 2011: 207). An amateur actor‘s ―improvis[ing]‖ (207) permits the screenplay-writer/ director to loosen her reigns, thus giving July respite comparable to the LTLYM artist-curators‘ decision not to exhibit their own works. Instead of claiming inspiration and genius, she admits in It Chooses You that artists fictionalize because real individuals remain enigmatic. Ending the narrative with her inability to unravel specific moments in an interviewee‘s life (212, 217-18) indicates the limits of assuming other subject positions - be it in positionality-oriented LTLYM assignments or as an artist. Overlapping ethical concerns, which arise upon contemplating depictions of selfhood, reality, and fiction in LTLYM, The Future, and It Chooses You, accentuate that the exigencies inherent in the production and consumption of various media (Internet, film, book) must be considered when pondering technology‘s effects. Here, funding and distribution questions loom large. The 2007 volume of LTLYM reports appeared with the Munich art-book publisher Prestel which, like McSweeney‘s, presumably appealed to July as an indie artist fearing commercial cooptation. 23 Similarly, grants from non-profit organizations supported the LTLYM website. 24 But as a filmmaker, July argues, accepting her sponsors‘ conditions for completing The Future ―seemed like a reasonable price to pay for getting to tell such a strange story in the most expensive but ultimately most accessible of mediums‖ (July 2011: 204; see MacDowell 2013: 53, Schreiber 2013: 96 on July‘s reputation as an independent director). The fact that July works in analogue and digital media, in media with com- 23 See Dean‘s study of ―the strange convergence of democracy and capitalism in networked communications and entertainment media‖ (Dean 2009: 4). 24 See www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/ hello/ creative_capital.php and www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/ grants.php. Life Writing in the Internet Age 143 paratively small and large circulations, in privately or otherwise funded media, and the fact that she addresses her ethical concerns reveal that the larger social issue of human interaction figures in all medial contexts, even if digital communication surfaces as a contradictory phenomenon which connects and divides in astonishing ways. If LTLYM foregrounds human emotions and intersubjectivity rather than technology; if The Future depicts a couple experimenting with separation from the Web; if It Chooses You contemplates lives within or outside digital or unmediated communication, how does July facilitate conversations about the psychological and social effects of technology? Much more than LTLYM, the latter two works problematize the contending forces of emotion-based relations versus technological immersion, of artistic and political idealisms, all of which figure prominently within recent studies of the social climate in the United States. Sherry Turkle argues that, instead of ―triumphalist or apocalyptic narratives,‖ we need ―narratives about how to live with technology‖ (2011: 294). July comes to the oddly Thoreauvian conclusion that, her acclimatization to abundant online information notwithstanding, encountering certain individuals made her feel ―like [she] wasn‘t living thoroughly enough‖ (It Chooses You 197). July‘s claim that the ―tenderness and attention‖ (July 2011: 216) of a love relationship counteract fear of death and loneliness coincides with Turkle‘s views on overcoming the acceptance effect fostered by online confessional forums (Turkle 2011: 230): rather than lowering one‘s expectations regarding human relations outside the Internet (231-32) and ―forgetting that what we do affects others‖ (234), Turkle suggests ―reclaiming good manners‖ (Turkle 2011: 296) by, for instance, not emailing or texting during family meals. Analogous to July‘s quandary regarding politeness toward strangers who make her squirm, Turkle commends middle-class conventions not for their own sake but rather to argue that technology use must be contemplated bidirectionally: one must assess the effect on the user and on others. Similarly, Lauren Berlant‘s concept of ―cruel optimism‖ helps contextualize July‘s work in the contemporary social climate because LTLYM and It Chooses You confront the dire emotional consequences of cruel optimism, in both cases through human interaction outside digital media and through art. While Berlant dismisses The Future as disappointingly apocalyptic, she might perceive It Chooses You - with its ethics of intense private relationships that may imply possibly meaningful existence - as confirming her theory of the affective potential of the ―avant-garde counternormative political work‖ found in art (Berlant 2011: 238). Berlant discusses the contemporary as a historicized moment. Her concepts of an ―intimate public‖ (first defined in The Female Complaint) and ―cruel optimism‖ (defined in the eponymous monograph) confirm my interpretation of July‘s conflicted artistic ethos, including her struggle with middle-class courtesy. Berlant contends that an ―affective contract‖ Nassim Balestrini 144 (2011: 66) inherent in artistic genres, that is, ―the affectivity of the historical present relayed by an aesthetic transmission‖ (66-67), has long been marginalized in American studies because ―historicism‖ and ―aestheticism‖ (67) have been perceived antagonistically. The decision to include aestheticism when studying the contemporary era supports my understanding of LTLYM: this participatory project prominently employs artistic self-expression and affect-oriented assignments to grasp the present, particularly in light of a personally recollected past. Intersubjective emotional experiences of the open-access LTYLM project create the type of ―intimate public[s]‖ Berlant identifies among individuals searching for solutions to potentially life-threatening predicaments (Berlant 2011: 226) and among voluntary associations without membership prerequisites (227). July‘s self-critical portrayal as a socialpractice artist who realizes the Internet‘s limitedness in enabling social cohesion embodies Berlant‘s central argument: ―an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object/ scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it: but its life-organizing status can trump interfering with the damage it provokes‖ (Berlant 2011: 227). The Internet provides a space for interaction; it simultaneously excludes Penny Saver interviewees and dominates July‘s life. Despite its threat of discomfiting encounters, non-digital communication promises pathways out of artistic gridlock. Berlant concludes that even awareness of the ―instability, fragility, and dear cost‖ of ―conventional good-life fantasies - say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work‖ (Berlant 2011: 2) cannot stop humans from trying to find ―better ways of mediating the sense of a historical moment that is affectively felt but undefined in the social world that is supposed to provide some comforts of belonging‖ (263). This perspective of expressing optimism through shared feelings that may exist against the odds of social isolation encourages interpreting the virtual relational microterritories of LTLYM reports as Berlantian attempts to create ―alternative filters that produce the sense - if not the scene - of a more livable and intimate sociality‖ (227). LTLYM does aim at providing a ―scene‖ for such ―sociality,‖ both online and offline. July‘s juxtaposition of failed and fulfilling encounters in It Chooses You strikes a balance between unwarranted and surprisingly confirmed optimism regarding her ability to connect (with) people. This reading of July‘s reflections on finishing The Future suggests an alternative to Berlant‘s comments on the film‘s ending. In an interview, Berlant characterizes the final scene in which, after Sophie has ended her affair with another man, Sophie and Jason are sitting in their studio apartment, physically apart and silent, as ―a crying clown shrug, saying, we can‘t save the world but we can find a waiting room in proximity to each other. The new Victorianism meets the new apocalypticism! ‖ (Berlant/ Greenwald 2012: 81). I suggest linking the open-ended closing scene Life Writing in the Internet Age 145 (will the couple separate or not? ) to the opening scene in which they share a couch while being immersed in their laptop screens. The partners‘ seeming togetherness evaporates through their engagement with digital technology. The closing scene demonstrates the difficulty of human relations, but it remains inconclusive regarding Sophie‘s and Jason‘s future(s). It Chooses You demonstrates that July is not satisfied with accepting the status quo and rather envisions what Turkle (2011: 234, 296) and Berlant offer as a solution, namely ―cultivating an ethical practice (…) of attentive care against the world that engenders the destruction of its vital subjects‖ (Berlant 2011: 87). If the film‘s open ending does not clearly imply such actions, It Chooses You does. July‘s artistic ethos rests on how fictionalizations offered by art - and, in the amateur context, by experimenting with relational, positional, and performative self-expression and depictions of others - provide opportunities for an affective poetics which is daring, challenging, and not entirely devastating as to how it conveys multiple perspectives on the contemporary as an interpretation of the past, the current moment, and the implied future. The crux of the matter for July as an artist and for scholars contemplating the sociopolitical implications of digital communication resides in the effects of how reality is defined and experienced. Aesthetic forms, as opposed to intellectual political discourse, legitimately enlist the surreal as an expressive mode. In The Future, the virtual and the surreal compete regarding their authenticity effect: would we accept Sophie‘s dances posted on YouTube as more real than Jason‘s ability to stop time in moments of crisis? If, as Baudrillard claims, the real and the referential embody power (Baudrillard 2010: 397), then July‘s insight that digital-world immersion nourished the illusion of living in a heightened reality, only to wake up to an unmediated reality which leaves her vulnerable, implies the necessity to create aesthetic discourses whose ‗reality‘ results in affective power that serves social practice. As a consequence, art needs to reclaim an authenticity effect that is in accordance with the autobiographical contract of life writing and that exudes the artist‘s respect for the recipient. Through its ―relational microterritories‖ (Bourriaud 2010), LTLYM created one particular ―civic culture‖ (Dahlgren 2012: 132) connecting unknown numbers of strangers, friends, and relatives, and ―circulat[ing] (…) meaning‖ (133-34) among them. By zeroing in on only a few characters in The Future, and on herself and her interviewees in It Chooses You, July illustrates coexisting discourses in flux and the artistically beneficial exercise of alternating between larger contexts and minutiae. It Chooses You begins with an interview with an elderly person completing a sex change; it ends with a widow mourning her husband of over six decades. Just as she juxtaposes a socially isolated person with a long-standing married couple, July continuously explores the entire spectrum between ‗new‘ and ‗old,‘ yet coexisting versions of individual and social existence. Nassim Balestrini 146 Life writing in analogue or digital media, as individual expression or participatory project, not only encourages the oscillation between narrow and wide foci on multiple ‗realities‘ through engaging relational, positional, and performative features, but its Janus-faced experiential and aesthetic anchoring also contributes to bridging the gaps between evolving artistic forms and political predicaments, as July‘s indie ethos of social interestedness demands. References Arata, Louis O. (2003). ―Reflections on Interactivity.‖ In: Thorburn & Jenkins (2003). 217-25. Arning, Bill (2004). ―Sure, Everyone Might Be an Artist … But Only One Artist Gets to Be the Guy Who Says That Everyone Else Is an Artist.‖ In: Purves (2004). 11-16. Arthur, Paul Longley (2009). ―Digital Biography: Capturing Lives Online.‖ a/ b: Auto/ Biography Studies 24.1 (2009). 74-92. Balestrini, Nassim W. (2012). ―July, No One Belongs Here More Than You.‖ Kindlers Literatur Lexikon (Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold). Online Literature Encyclopedia. Stuttgart: Metzler. Barok, Dusan (2009). ―On Participatory Art: Interview with Claire Bishop.‖ N.pag. [online] www.scribd.com/ doc/ 56968733/ On-participatory-art-Interview-with -Claire-Bishop (22 May 2015). Baudrillard, Jean (2012). ―The Precession of Simulacra.‖ In: Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas M. Kellner (eds). Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. 2 nd ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. 388-407. Berlant, Lauren (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP. Berlant, Lauren (2008). The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke UP. Berlant, Lauren & Jordan Greenwald (2012). ―Affect in the End Times: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.‖ Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 20.2 (2012). 71-89. Bishop, Claire (2004). ―Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.‖ October 110 (Fall 2004): 51-79. Bishop, Claire (2006). ―Introduction: Viewers as Producers.‖ In: Bishop (2006). 1- 17. Bishop, Claire (ed.) (2006). Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, and Cambridge: MIT Press. Boddy, William (2004). ―Redefining the Home Screen: Technological Convergence as Trauma and Business Plan.‖ In: Thorburn & Jenkins (2003). 191-200. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2010). Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Trans. Jeanine Herman, 2002. 2nd ed. 2005. New York: Lucas & Sternberg. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods, 1998. Dijon: France: Les presses du réel. Broeckmann, Andreas (1999). ―Are You Online? Presence and Participation in Network Art.‖ In: Timothy Druckrey (ed.), with Ars Electronica. Ars Electronica: Facing the Future: A Survey of Two Decades. Cambridge: MIT Press. 438-41. Browne, Sarah (2008). ―Crowd Theory Lite.‖ CIRCA 126 (Winter 2008). 33-39. Life Writing in the Internet Age 147 Bryan-Wilson, Julia (2007). ―A Modest Collective: Many People Doing Simple Things Well.‖ In: Fletcher & July (2007). 144-46. Bryan-Wilson, Julia (2004). ―Some Kind of Grace: An Interview with Miranda July.‖ Camera Obscura 19.1 (2004). 180-97. Cameron, Julia (1992). The Artist‟s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. New York: Penguin. Chang, Chris (2000). ―Renaissance Riot Grrrl Rising.‖ Film Comment 36.4 (2000). 16. Chatfield, Tom (2012). How to Thrive in the Digital Age. London: Macmillan. Colman, Alison (2005). ―Constructing an Aesthetic of Web Art from a Review of Artists‘ Use of the World Wide Web.‖ Visual Arts Research 31 (2005). 13-25. Cote, David (2003). ―Drama for the Ear and the Imagination.‖ New York Times 17 Aug. 2003, late ed., East Coast: 2.5. Dahlgren, Peter (2012). ―The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation.‖ In: Thussu (2012) 3. 131-49. Dean, Jodi (2010). Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge, England: Polity. Dean, Jodi (2009). Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke UP. Dezeuze, Anna (2008). ―Express Yourself! ‖ Variant 31 (Spring 2008). 3-4. Dodson, Thomas, Jen Barnett et al. (2011). ―I Am Wild and Always Will Be: A Conversation with Miranda July.‖ Printer‟s Devil Review 1.2 (2011). 45-52. Eakin, Paul John (1999). How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Eakin, Paul John (2008). Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Egan, Susanna (2010). ―Auto/ Biographical Impostures as Media Sensations.‖ Alfred Hornung (ed.). Auto/ Biography and Mediation. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. 131-37. Elmhirst, Sophie (2011). ―‗It‘s More Interesting to Play the Person Who Makes Mistakes: The NS Interview [with Miranda July, Writer and Film-maker].‖ New Statesman 140.5078 (2011). 38-39. Fischer, Gerhard & Florian Vassen (2011). ―Collective Creativity: Traditional Patterns and New Paradigms.‖ Collective Creativity: Collaborative Work in the Sciences, Literature and the Arts. Amsterdam: Rodopi. xi-xv. Fletcher, Harrell (2002). ―Towards a Tender Society of Thoughtful Questions and Answers.‖ [online] www.harrellfletcher.com/ 2006/ index3b.html (22 May 2015). Fletcher, Harrell (2007). ―Some Thoughts on Art and Education.‖ [online] www.harrellfletcher.com/ 2006/ index3b.html (22 May 2015). Fletcher, Harrell & Miranda July (2007). ―Hello.‖ In: Fletcher & July (2007). n. pag. Fletcher, Harrell & Miranda July (2007). Learning to Love You More. Munich: Prestel. Fowle, Kate & Lars Bang Larsen (2004). ―Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrative Space, and Unproductive Activity.‖ In: Purves (2004). 17-26. Gerhards, Jürgen & Mike S. Schäfer (2010). ―Is the Internet a Better Public Sphere? Comparing Old and New Media in the USA and Germany.‖ New Media & Society 12.1 (2010). 143-60. Gibson Yates, Sarah (2011). ―User: Reflections on the Narrativization of Self Within Social Networking Sites: A Presentation and Discussion of the Processes In- Nassim Balestrini 148 volved in the Development of a Creative Work-in-Progress.‖ Book 2.0 1.1 (2011). 31-37. Giles, Paul (2006). ―Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality.‖ American Literary History 18.3 (Fall 2006). 648-55. Gitelman, Lisa (2003). ―How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph.‖ In: Thorburn & Jenkins (2003). 61-79. Glissant, Édouard (2006). ―Poetics of Relation: 1990.‖ In: Bishop (2006). 71-78. Goldenberg, David & Patricia Reed (2008). ―What Is a Participatory Practice? ‖ Fillip 8 (2008): n. pag. Hall, Emily (2003). ―Miranda July.‖ Art Forum 42.3 (2003). 194. Halter, Ed (2005). ―People Person: Hyphenate Hipstress Miranda July Infiltrates Indiewood.‖ Village Voice 15-21 June 2005. 34-35. Hansson, Karin et al. (2011). ―Prototyping for Participatory Democracy: Fine Arts as Means for the Study of Multi-modal Communication in Public Decision Making.‖ [online] www.academia.edu (27 May 2015). Heim, Michael (1994). ―The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace.‖ Excerpted from The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Repr. in Trend, Reading (2001). 70-86. Higgs, Mathew. ―Miranda July.‖ Interview Magazine. [online] www.interview magazine.com/ art/ miranda-july/ (22.05.2012). Hilderbrand, Lucas (2009). Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Durham: Duke UP. Ingram, Jessica, Ted Purves, and Shane Aslan Selzer (eds.) (2005). ―Project Histories.‖ In: Purves (2005). 107-68. Jenkins, Henry (2012). ―The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence.‖ In: Thussu (2012). 2: 219-29. Johnson, Brian D (2005). ―Film: Me and You and Miranda July.‖ Maclean‟s 25 July 2005: 58. July, Miranda (dir.) (2011). The Future. Perf. Miranda July, Hamish Linklater, David Warshofsky, Isabella Acres & Joe Putterlik. Mongrel Media. July, Miranda (dir.) (2005). Me and You and Everyone We Know. Perf. Miranda July, John Hawkes, Miles Thompson, et al. IFC Films. July, Miranda (2011). It Chooses You. San Francisco: McSweeney‘s. July, Miranda (2008). No One Belongs Here More Than You. New York: Scribner. July, Miranda. Also see Fletcher. Keen, Andrew (2007). The Cult of the Amateur: How Today‟s Internet Is Killing Our Culture. New York: Doubleday. Keen, Andrew (2012). Digital Vertigo: How Today‟s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us. London: Constable. King, Geoff, Claire Molloy & Yannis Tzioumakis (eds.) (2013). American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood, and Beyond. London: Routledge. Kitzmann, Andreas (2003). ―That Different Place: Documenting the Self within Online Environments.‖ Biography 26.1 (2003). 48-65. Koppel, Lily (2011). ―Classified Lives.‖ New York Times, 4 Dec. 2011, late ed., final ed.: 43. Kroker, Arthur & Michael A. Weinstein (2001). ―The Theory of the Virtual Class.‖ Excerpted from Their Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class. New York: St. Martin‘s P, 1994. 4-26. Repr. in Trend, Reading (2001). 144-53. Landow, George (2001). ―Hypertext and Critical Theory.‖ Excerpted from Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. 2-12. Repr. in Trend, Reading (2001). 98-108. Life Writing in the Internet Age 149 [Lark, Laura.](2007). ―Laura Lark.‖ In: Fletcher/ July (2007). 147. Larsen, Lars Bang (2006). ―Social Aesthetics: 1999.‖ In: Bishop (2006). 172-83. Levander, Caroline F. & Robert S. Levine (2008). ―Introduction: Essays Beyond the Nation.‖ Caroline F. Levander & Robert S. Levine (eds.). Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 1-17. Lévy, Pierre (1997). ―Collective Intelligence.‖ Excerpt from Pierre Lévy. ―Introduction.‖ Collective Intelligence. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1997. 1-10. Repr. in Trend, Reading 253-58. Lievrouw, Leah A. (2011). Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge: Polity. Lunenfeld, Peter (2011). The Secret War between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine. Cambridge: MIT Press. Maak, Niklas (2009). ―Ich habe versucht, mein Leben zu retten.‖ 7 June 2009. [online] www.faz.net/ aktuell/ feuilleton/ kunst/ kuenstlerin-miranda-july-ichhabe-versucht-mein-leben-zu-retten-1596104.html (22 May 2015). MacDowell, James (2013). ―Quirky: Buzzword or Sensibility? ‖ In: King, Molloy & Tzioumakis (2013). 53-64. Möntmann, Nina (2011). ―New Communities.‖ In: Wappler (2011). 65-70. Nesbit, Molly, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija (2006). ―What Is a Station? ‖ In: Bishop (2006). 184-89. Onstad, Katrina (2011). ―The Make-Believer.‖ New York Times 17 July 2011, late ed., final ed., correction appended. Poster, Mark (2001). ―Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere.‖ Repr. from David Porter, ed. Internet Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. 201-18. Repr. in Trend, Reading (2001). 259-71. Purves, Ted (2005). ―Introductory Remarks on the Handbook [for Gift and Exchange-Based Art].‖ In: Purves (2005). 101-05. Purves, Ted (ed.) (2004). What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art. Albany: SUNY Press. Qvortrup, Lars (2012). ―Understanding New Digital Media: Medium Theory or Complexity Theory? ‖ In: Thussu (2012). 2: 247-56. Rabin, Nathan (2005). ―Interview: Miranda July.‖ A. V. Club. [Online] www.avclub.com/ article/ miranda-july-13940 (22 May 2015). Radway, Jan (2002). ―What‘s in a Name? ‖ In: Donald E. Pease & Robyn Wiegman (eds.). The Futures of American Studies. Durham: Duke UP. 45-75. Rancière, Jacques (2006). ―Problems and Transformations in Critical Art: 2004.‖ In: Bishop (2006). 83-93. Rebentisch, Juliane (2007). ―The Politics of Art and the Power of the Aesthetic.‖ In: Klaus Benesch & Ulla Haselstein (eds.) (2007). The Power and Politics of the Aesthetic in American Culture. Heidelberg: Winter. 55-67. Ross, Andrew (2001). ―The New Smartness.‖ Repr. from Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckery, eds. Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology. San Francisco: Bay P, 1998. 329-41. Trend, Reading (2001). 354-63. Rowe, John Carlos (ed.) (2000). Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: U of California P. [Russell, Jacinda, with Tim & David Haslet.] ―Jacinda Russell (with Tim & David Haslet).‖ In: Fletcher/ July (2007). 148-49. Schaffer, Kay & Sidonie Smith (2004). Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schiller, Herbert I (2001). ―The Global Information Highway: Project for an Ungovernable World.‖ Excerpt from eponymous essay in James Brook & Iain A. Nassim Balestrini 150 Bola (eds.). Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco: City Lights. Repr. in Trend, Reading (2001). 159-71. Schorgl, Annie (2009). ―A Labor of Love: Art Production and Social Practice in Learning to Love You More.‖ M.A. thesis, U of Cincinnati. Schreiber, Michele (2013). ―Their Own Personal Velocity: Women Directors and Contemporary Independent Cinema.‖ In: King, Molloy & Tzioumakis (2013). 96-107. Scott, A. O. (2005). ―An Artistic Eye Wide Open, Observing Odd, Lost Souls.‖ New York Times 17 June 2005, late ed., East Coast: E1: 13. Scott, A. O. (2000). ―Video As Art in a World on Tape.‖ New York Times 21 July 2000, late ed., East Coast: E1: 1. Scott, A. O. (2010). ―Young Filmmaker Tells Hollywood It Can Wait.‖ New York Times 19 June 2005. 10 Jan. 2010. Smith, Sidonie (2011). ―Presidential Address 2011: Narrating Lives and Contemporary Imaginaries.‖ PMLA 126.3 (2011): 564-74. Smith, Sidonie & Julia Watson (2010). Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P. Starre, Alexander (2010). ―‗Little Heavy Papery Beautiful Things‘: McSweeney‘s, Metamediality, and the Rejuvenation of the Book in the USA.‖ Writing Technologies 3 (2010): 25-41. Stasko, Carly (2008). ―(r)Evolutionary Healing.‖ Anita Harris (ed.). Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism. New York: Routledge. 193-219. Stone, Allucquère Rosanne (Sandy) (2001). ―Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? : Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures.‖ Excerpt from eponymous essay in Michael Benedikt (ed.). Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. Repr. in Trend, Reading (2001). 185-98. Svensson, Jörgen (2005). ―Four Projects.‖ In: Purves (2005). 47-59. Taubin, Amy (1999). ―The 24-hour Women.‖ Village Voice 6 July 1999, 70. Thomson, Desson (2005). ―Here & Now.‖ Washington Post 27 Nov. 2005: N.02. Thorburn, David & Henry Jenkins (eds.) (2003). Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge: MIT Press. Thussu, Daya Kishan (ed.) (2012). International Communication. 4 vols. Los Angeles: Sage. Traister, Bryce (2010). ―The Object of Study; or, Are We Being Transnational Yet? ‖. The Journal of Transnational American Studies 2.1 (2010): 1-28. Trend, David (2001). ―Introduction.‖ In: Trend (2001). 1-5. Trend, David (ed.) (2001). Reading Digital Culture. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Turkle, Sherry (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Virilio, Paul (2001). ―Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm! ‖ (23-27). French original published in Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1995. Trans. Patrice Riemens. Repr. in Trend (2001). 23-27. Wappler, Friederike. Trans. John Bridgen. Foreword. In: Wappler (2011). 13-15. Wappler, Friederike (ed.) (2011). Neue Bezugsfelder in Kunst und Gesellschaft / New Relations in Art and Society. Zurich: JPR Ringer. Whitlock, Gillian & Anna Poletti (2008). ―Self-Regarding Art.‖ Biography 31.1 (Winter 2008): v-xxiii. Nassim Balestrini Department of American Studies University of Graz