“How much change is too much change?” : Vivek Shraya’s mediated selves
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | In her aptly titled 2022 essay People change, Canadian multigenre artist Vivek Shraya wonders, “how much change is too much change?” (69). This comment on the position of a celebrity artist today highlights the seemingly contradictory audience expectations of authenticity and novelty. Together with the requirement of frequent production, these expectations are characteristic of the relationships between audiences and creators in the digital age. As in other areas, they are only more demanding on intersectionally marginalized creators like Shraya. Drawing primarily on life-writing scholarship and persona studies, and with attention to the different media affordances, this paper identifies one strategy Shraya employs to navigate these pressures: the prolific production of digitally available, episodical, interconnected, and occasionally inconsistent life writing and “automedia” (Rak 2015). The paper traces how these life-writing fragments in various media, platforms, and modes (e.g., essays, a graphic memoir, a play, photography, Instagram) aid Shraya in creating her artist persona. With her autobiographical expression varying across these forms, the paper also demonstrates that fulfilling the expectations of frequent content production, self-commodification, and providing the audience with access to one’s privacy appears to be prioritized over the conventional expectation of consistency. While adopting the artist persona allows for some challenges to this convention, Shraya’s comment about change exemplifies the negotiations such persona nonetheless entails. Through the discussion of Shraya’s autobiographical production, the paper exemplifies the impact of digital forms of self-representation on contemporary autobiographical expression. |
| Související projekty: |