Jacqueline Dynon (b.2004)
The Sacred Altar of the Teenage Girl, 2024
Multimedia collage
The pieces of data that echo from my time online, and the missing paint on my wall from the posters I stick to it. My bedroom is filled with lost relics of the Teenage Girl. Ribbons from gifts I received, notes passed between class, little doodles in the corner of my notebooks, and poems trying to capture the feeling of it all. Everything I’ve ever loved and lost trails me like a ghost. The Teenage Girl is a sacred place, one that I return to when I need it most, in hardship or pure happiness. These ghosts of me are my long-lost best friend. My companion on my sleepless nights and lazy afternoons. I worship the altar of my self, and the love that has flowed through my veins.
Closer Look:
Reflection:
When I saw that the theme for the exhibition was “Home Sweet Home” I immediately knew that I wanted to create a little glimpse into my bedroom, the safest and most sacred place I have. As a firm believer that being vulnerable and pushing your comfort zone will produce the best content no matter what your endeavor, I decided that I would try to make a piece that was as authentic to myself and my home as I could. In this sense, however, my home was more of a manifestation of my mind. A note from a previous close friend that says “I love you sorta” feels more intimate in its existence than a piece of writing I make waxing poetic about what that kind of item means to me. The smallest note with a hint of love, that has lived with me for the last 6 years says more in the fact that I have it than it does on paper. Just as the ribbon from a gift from my best friend for my 18th birthday that I still wear in my hair says far more about my own sense of home than any street address will.
These lingering ghosts and memorials to the love I have shared and received created the home that I wanted to share with the audience of the exhibition. All the pieces I saved were pulled out of their boxes and paired with the largest bank of my memories that there is, my own digital data. Music has always been something I loved to create, consume, live, and breathe. The 538,812 minutes I have spent listening to Spotify since 2020 as I’m writing this may just be enough to prove that. Even as I talk about how I used that very data to create poetry, the poems of the future are being created by the music I’m currently listening to. 374 days of Spotify listening accumulates to just over 5% of my life right now, all compiled into some .txt documents saying exactly who I was 4 years ago. The feeling of seeing this for the first time and trying to comprehend just how much time that had taken made me feel a small wave of the sublime, a feeling we had discussed in class. I wanted to try and create an exhibit that both celebrated and feared the passage of time, just as I did when I felt that wave. Using my Spotify data, I created poems about ghosts, new perspectives and the undoing of time, and the age-old statement “You’ll understand when you’re older”.
I tried to use my artist statement to explain this cultivation of seemingly random objects, while also allowing the viewer to navigate and interpret the piece as they wished to. Titling the piece “The Sacred Altar of the Teenage Girl” aimed to communicate what this piece ultimately felt like, a collection of relics that exemplified both girlhood and the weirdest feeling of all, love. It describes “the Teenage Girl” as a place that one can return to, ultimately, a home which houses my friends and fears. As Risch states in ‘Conquering The Dreaded Artist Statement’, “[Artist] Statements help artists “have a hand” in how people talk and think about their work” The poetry being themed around fragments of both memory and my self was the way I built this contrasting idea outside of the statement. The poems were clunky and abstract, and the image of the data being blacked out invokes the feeling of a mental blank. On the other hand, the photos and notes from my loved ones were the clear artifacts of the feeling I was trying to invoke in the viewer, a longing for the past and a fear of leaving it behind. Even if that past we are longing for, is simple the version of us that listened to the same song 800 times. The poetry changed and evolved in theming, as combing through data is a game of both luck and patience, but my poem features “New Perspective” was the perfect centerpiece of poetry for the Sacred Altar, asking the universe to “Whisper the reason the time is undone”. This experimental process was something I really developed through my experiments with Big Data, where this idea was born, and helped me develop a clearer idea of the kind of image I wanted the poetry to create.
In Annie Dorsen’s writing on ‘The Sublime and the Digital Landscape’, Dorsen states that
“[The sublime] will destroy us in the end . . . but temporarily, from a safe perch,”. In my poems I wanted to convey this Nihilism through themes of the meaning of oneself and live, and the ultimate unavoidable passage of time. These themes being pulled from what is ultimately a large chunk of data ties into the “fascination with data visualization and its potential for knowledge” (McCosker, A., & Wilken, R. (2014)) that has come from the link between the sublime and data visualization itself. I aimed in this project to further “the sublime fantasy of ‘mapping the unmappable” (McCosker, A., & Wilken, R. (2014), by combining relics and massive incomprehensible amounts of data, from a massive portion of my life and using it to turn my internal thoughts, emotions, and memories into a viewable, consumable, and tangible exhibit. Speaking to people as they viewed the exhibit and explaining different pieces that they asked about and using the feedback from both my peers and tutor on how I could develop the piece made it a much larger and more developed idea than i originally started with. I continued to look at the sticky notes with the keywords given to me by classmates and how they interpreted my project.
As time passes the poetry on the wall can change, and the data I’m scraping from will also reshape itself. I’d love to create a version of this that could take up a whole wall in a house or gallery, something that builds slowly over time and develops as more data is created and more relics are found from the thousands of versions of myself that existed. Experimenting more with color and with the messages, thoughts, and ideas I want to explain through the poetry I write, or maybe even creating a wall of sorts with multiple people contributing their own relics, showing differing experiences of the Teenage Girl. I see the Sacred Altar as a never-ending project, as I keep each receipt, and each note left on my desk the Altar expands, each time I place it on a wall it moves and molds itself into a reflection of my current state, and all the weird feelings inside me. This class has made me consider the way that I consume and contemplate my data, and the at times beautiful, nihilism of our unfathomably small place in the world. Because even though I am small in this universe, I have been able experience so many things and been able to feel so many weird feelings.
“Give me a new perspective, for I am to wither, whisper the reason the time is undone.”
References:
Dorsen, A (2018). The Sublime and the Digital Landscape. Theater 55-67. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-4250956
McCosker, A., & Wilken, R. (2014). Rethinking ‘big data’ as visual knowledge: the sublime and the diagrammatic in data visualisation. Visual Studies, 29(2), 155–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.887268
Risch, C. (2017). CONQUERING THE DREADED ARTIST STATEMENT: EXPERT ADVICE FOR WRITING ABOUT YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY. PDN ; Photo District News, 37(8), 34-37. https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/conquering-dreaded-artist-statement-expert-advice/docview/1924518291/se-2