Producing this work really resonated with me, in my lifetime I have consumed, digested and been moved by many “video monologues” and it doesn’t always just boil down to the scene in a movie but many other iterations of how we identify with art ‘after the internet’. I like that Gronlund states “people are talking and talking to each other”. I see this on a daily basis, and hear it too. I wanted my work to demonstrate this statement in its simplest form. 

In ‘Melissa Gronlunds’ ‘From Narcissism to the Dialogic: Identity in Art after the Internet’ there are examples of the diversity of dialogue from interviews, chatrooms and art pieces like Richard and Reinke’s ‘Disambiguation’. I faced some uncertainties that made me feel a little disengaged in societal practices that relate to how prolific certain processes of communication are. 

I wanted my work to take an element from a couple of Melissa Gronlund’s cases, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t go into producing this work with much expectation of it being the exact presentation of ‘a work with dialogue’. I learnt that so much of what we are involved with on the internet uses dialogue, and I feel as though the works from the artists within the reading supported that- they all varied. It reassured me, as it prefaced the materiality of dialogue and how it can be manipulated to showcase any matter of creation in our realm.

Interested by the idea of ‘Heteroglossia’, where there are more than one viewpoints within something, I wanted my work to showcase a volley back and fourth of conversation. Similar to Gronlunds thoughts on ‘The Image of The Internet’ I feel the piece I produced showed how its difficult to be without people listening, reading or listening in. “It reflects an obsession, even narcissistic in character, with one’s identity, but also a conception of identity as not controllable by one’s self, but determined and organised by factors beyond one’s scope” 

I was inspired by the formatting of Stark’s “My Best Thing”, mainly for the old school ‘clunky’ nature it unveiled when the avatars talked to each other. I wanted my video to be a visual representation of words with the same alliteration to dialogue. Narrowing down to the word in focus ‘dialogue’ as this all happens you hear an overlap of conversation between four people, including myself. I find the small vertical blinking line (cursor) in word documents very intriguing, it is always waiting to be utilised and for me it’s like the ‘pulse’ of our thoughts before we publish, send or post them out into the world and on the internet. 

What stood out to me from the reading was how dialogue “enables a public performance of identity” My work enables that level of public performance to be displayed in a short audio visual work. It represents the feeling of having a conversation, knowing your thoughts and dialogue are being understood and perceived by who you’re directly speaking with but also others, does cadence and vernacular change when you know specific people are in ear shot? I always wonder if we talk to one person like a thousand are listening. This sort of represents that dialogue we always face, when at a dinner table, a party, opening, or even on public transport. It also made me wonder if our over-hearings influences our actions? Is it the analogue algorithm of our life?

Next I’d like to get more people involved and turn this into more of a production, maybe one that is acted out and people read of scripts. I’d love to see how I could adapt this into a short skit or performance.

Gronlund, M. (2014). From Narcissism to the Dialogic: Identity in Art after the Internet. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 37, 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1086/679372