Cover | Indice Anotado, 13 years of Mid-Career research investigations from architecture students of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.

Jorge Rigau, FAIA, founding dean of the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico; Miguel Rodríguez, current dean; and funds from the Historic Preservation Office of Puerto Rico have made it possible to publish the Índice Anotado (Anotated Index). This publication documents the Mid-Career research investigations completed by students at the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.

These texts were completed between 1996 and 2009 and executed by students at the end of the 3rd year of study. Their topical range is extensive, and most are complemented by photographs, drawings and inventories that will be useful to others following similar lines of research. While the collection is mainly about Puerto Rico, some projects look at Cuba, Dominican Republic and Panamá.

The index is organized by themes, and while some overlap, researchers will have to asses the focus areas of each of their topics to find relevant investigations. The documents are written in Spanish, but the the index provides a blurb about each of them in English to expand the ideas to a larger audience.

Copies of the full writings will be available for public consult at the library of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and at the library of the Historic Preservation Office. The Índice Anotado has been designed by Alberto Rigau and published by Editorial Revés.

Recently, while watching some of these shows, I noted a change in the commercial advertising landscape: the automotive industry is trying to harness the power of typography and verbal communications to make its pitch to us.

Take this particular advertisement for Ford’s new F-150. The advertisement, clearly influenced by recent kinetic typography explorations found in almost every video portal site, uses scale, contrast, motion, rhythm, and verbal language to communicate its message to the screen-engaged viewers.

My issue? While I am very happy to see typography take a lead-actor role in contemporary motion-based advertising, I don’t want to see it become just another plastic jewel of a bedazzled composition. Seeing typography play a superficial role illustrates a weak command of the medium. In this previous example, I question the effectiveness of the strategy when the subject matter of the commercial is rendered almost invisible. What was this commercial about again?

The kinetic typography technique, in my opinion, works best when the visual cues offered by the images allow viewers to immerse in the story being told. Examples of it cover the whole spectrum of genres, from comedy…

Content cited is from the movie Wedding Crashers.

…to serious dramatic compositions… (sorry for the Spanish)

For Random House Mondadori.

…but no matter the thematic purpose of these two previous examples, the visual cues assert the typographic narrativs being told.

In the case of some of these recent vehicle commercials, there is a split between the visual and typographic stories, rendering the ads, in my opinion, ineffective. I don’t mean to insinuate that this is happening because of the technique being used. In 2006, The Brand New School produced The Car That Reads the Road campaign for Toyota in Australia.

These ads, while beautiful and rendered to the highest of technological standards, also fall into this fuzzy realm where I think typography and content are not quite peacefully having a conversation, and I think this happens again because no substantial story is being told. This lack of narrative provokes a superficial role for the typography and to its possibilities.

The sad thing is that the automotive industry has experienced the success of real storytelling (By storytelling I don’t mean those ads where cars are the main actors of unbelievable feats, but stories with a plot, actors, and process). The 2002 release of John Frankenheimer’s Ambush on the BMW Films website serves as a clear case study.

Ambush, by John Frankenheimer.

With the series, BMW delved into storytelling and was rewarded when it saw their 2002 sales numbers go up 12% from the previous year. The movies were viewed over 11 million times in four months. ¹ The films proved to be so popular, that BMW produced a few more seasons and showcased many more of its vehicles in action that it would have ever done with a standard advertising campaign.

Clearly the automotive industry is in the midst of an identity crisis, questioning the ways it does things. I just think it has been doing this for a while now… not finding a clear position for itself… and not understanding how to talk to its audience. There is no need for this move to superficial strategies. All is has to do is connect with the audience… provide stories… (and then bring in typography) and not only will it see itself rewarded, but also provide a more meaningful experience for those who have to see these spots repeated for weeks at a time, armed only with the weapons of changing a channel or muting the speakers.

I finally was able to respond to her query, even though I’ll admit that I am not quite sure what I said. At the time, I verbally articulated an answer while I simultaneously thought about the question. In retrospect now, where do I stand on this debate?

Three landscapes are important to my work: content, concept, and context. One of my design interests lies in articulating the space between the three, in finding overlays and relational patters among them. It’s like being able to identify and work in that moment when one is between being awake and being asleep, when one still remembers dreams. The point is that I am interested in the relation of these, and it is my belief that an adequate understanding of it leads to, and concludes in formal creations. I see form as the subjective outcome of the interplay of these landscapes.

Answering Marty’s question, since I see form as a subjective outcome of the relationship between content, concept and context, form in itself can only be understood as content. It produces and embodies a particular meaning. If some other person where to receive the same specs and assignment that I got for some of my earlier work, I am sure that the end-product would be different, a different piece, a different outcome, and hence, a different content.

On a recent article in the New York Times, Unboxed: Design Is More Than Packaging, the author, Janet Rae-Dupree, makes an effort to unbox “design” by concentrating on this thing designers do called design thinking. She says: “…design thinking usually involves a period of field research —usually close observation of people— to generate inspiration and a better understanding of what is needed, followed by open, nonjudgmental generation of ideas. After a brief analysis, a number of the more promising ideas are combined and expanded to go into “rapid prototyping,” which can vary from a simple drawing or text description to a three-dimensional mock-up. Feedback on the prototypes helps hone the ideas so that a select few can be used. The results can be startling.”

On another article in the Fast Company website, Design Thinking… What is that?, its author, Mark Dziersk, defines design thinking as consisting of four steps: defining the problem, creating many options, refining selected directions, and picking a winner for execution. He says: “At this point enough road has been traveled to insure success. It’s the time to commit resources to achieve the early objectives. The byproduct of the process is often other unique ideas and strategies that are tangential to the initial objective as defined. Prototypes of solutions are created in earnest, and testing becomes more critical and intense. At the end of stage 4 the problem is solved or the opportunity is fully uncovered.” He concludes the article with: “Design thinking describes a repeatable process employing unique and creative techniques which yield guaranteed results — usually results that exceed initial expectations. Extraordinary results that leapfrog the expected. This is why it is such an attractive, dynamic and important methodology for businesses to embrace today.”

While these two examples, noble in their intentions and approach, describe a bit of what design thinking can be in terms of a traditional object-oriented approach where processes conclude in tangible objects, they do not elaborate on how design thinking operates in this contemporary landscape of information and ever-changing job descriptions.

Stanford University’s Institute of Design, probably the academic institution that most publicly associates itself with this idea of design thinking, defines it as “a catalyst for innovation and bringing new things into the world“. Their website elaborates: “We believe having designers in the mix is key to success in multidisciplinary collaboration and critical to uncovering unexplored areas of innovation. Designers provide a methodology that all parties can embrace and a design environment conducive to innovation. In our experience, design thinking is the glue that holds these kinds of communities together and makes them successful.”

This approach, on a positive note to my understanding of design thinking, extends design beyond its relation to objects. It helps us better imagine how it can respond to the changing definitions of form and making in this digital information era, but it still does not inform us of how it can achieve all that it preaches.

Many more myriad perspectives exist out there. This plural landscape of varied definitions —just google search design thinking to find out— blurs the clear understanding of design thinking.

What is design thinking? How does it work? How can we reveal its benefits and potential? Achieving such clarity was the goal of our first studio project this semester. We were interested in seperating the idea of design thinking from its most common association with the business world.

Here at the NC State graphic design graduate program, design thinking is defined as the use, consideration, and implementation of a series of thinking strategies and cognitive frameworks in the formulation, articulation, and implementation of design processes.

Sounds complicated? It is, but the the goal of the project was to “define and explain in plain English that a non-designer can understand“. Each classmate was assigned a strategy or framework to research and communicate the findings. It was our goal to explain design thinking through the explanation of these 16 ideas.

by Robert Ruehlman

by Liese Zahabi

by Marty Maxwell Lane

by Dan McCafferty

by Brooke Chornyak

by Rebecca Tegtmeyer

by Tania Allen

by Lincoln Hancock

by Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

by Sidney Fritts

by Samyul Kim

by Cady Bean-Smith

by Alberto Rigau

by Caroline Prietz

by Anthony Fugulo

by Lauren Waugh

These posters not only present definitions, they also explain case-studies of real projects to show how each particular concept can be applied and used.

I think that as a class we were successful in communicating that design thinking is not about being hip, flashy or into the latest trend, but about a serious take on the understanding of experiences, behaviors and social interactions to produce context-relevant work which not only solves problems, but innovates to create meaning and reflection.

[These posters were exhibited at Leazar Hall in the College of Design at North Carolina State University from September 12 thru the 26th of 2008 ][see 1][see 2]

A typical scene in my life…

April 2008… I decide to submit a draft for the Social Studies Conference: Educating Designers in a Connected World to be held at MICA this upcoming October. Deadline for submissions… July 15th. Yup, I got time.

July 14th: 6:00pm… Dammit! It’s been raining all day, internet connection has been down, and I have to submit the abstract! Tic, tock… Tic, toc…

hehehe

I submitted the abstract on time (see below)(and I even got a happy confirmation e-mail from the conference).

In this three-credit sophomore course, Imaging II: Settings and People (Leading to Activity Scenarios)*, students are introduced to interaction and time-based media by working with three key ideas: settings, people and scenarios. Each of these concepts is addressed through a particular investigation: a “Site Survey (settings);” a “Subject Study (people);” and an “Activity Map (scenarios).”

For the site survey investigation, and to elucidate over this idea of settings, students built annotated panoramas of a repetitive event in their daily lives. To visualize the importance of people within a system, students interviewed members within the design school to collect ethnographic data, and then designed one-minute video clips and European-sized broadsheets. Finally, the semester concluded in understanding scenarios. Students created paper-prototypes, modeled in stop-animation video clips, to show possible interactions in the university (setting), between a user (people) and an interface on a mobile platform.

Throughout the semester, concepts and ideas were taught by exposing students to observation and interpretative methods such as annotated panoramas/tableaus, visual essays, authored journals, video interviews, collaborative ideation techniques, activity maps, paper-prototyping, and stop-animation photography. These “image-making” strategies help students visualize and actualize key aspects (and phases) of all manner of design problems (be they project-definition-driven, project-building, project-making, etc.).

Through these investigations, students can better survey, document and understand sites and subjects as they focus their attention on to new and unique design challenges brought on by contemporary communications systems, such as in branding, services and experiences, and interaction design.

* It was taught during the Spring of 2008 by co-instructors Santiago Piedrafita (full-time faculty member) and myself Alberto Rigau (graduate student).

In developing an individual identity and its consequential representations, a human being, as a cultural, social, and psychological entity, interprets, uses, and garners information from its surrounding environments. In the process, contexts are synthesized and associations are established. The management of these intuitive processes leads to the creation of personal thoughts, views and perspectives which are later shared through various forms of exchange.

The emergence of social networking sites, instant messaging platforms, discussion forums, email, collaborative online games, digital worlds, and particularly blogs, have transmuted the nature of these exchanges. Introspection has now become projection. Private realities have now expanded into contemporary shared conditions of public life. These outlets of personality provide versatile ways of sharing internal, and beforehand private anecdotal information with others.

The introduction of online blogging platforms during the late 1990’s made it easier than ever to share, communicate and contrast one’s individuality with the ideas of others in similar techno-social realities. As of March 2008, Technorati¹ calculated an estimated 112.8 million online blogs worldwide, a datum that needs to be pruned carefully since online does not equal active. There maybe that many blogs, but that does not mean there are exactly that same amount of active content generators behind them. There is no precise quantitative data on how many abandoned blogs exist, yet the available data does suggest a parallel growth between that of new blogs being published and those being simultaneously abandoned. Due to the free-of-charge nature of the majority of blog hosting domains, most of the blogs, even after being abandoned, remain online indefinitely.

I will try to make that case that through this ever-lasting online presence, contemporary communication platforms, such as the blog, can extend our sense of being, even after we become non-being.

Debates exist over when the first blog was published, but it can be said with some certainty, thanks to contemporary tools such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, that such a feat took place sometime between 1997 and 1999. The personal blog, as a medium for expression, closely mimics the behaviors of a diary or journal, where content is added through chronological texts (posts), which are sometimes annotated with visual media. Online, these posts are tagged by thematic relevance, archived for later reference and customizable searching. Consistent users thus create, as they participate in the activity of blogging, a chronological summary of their lives. Subsequently these are then shared with others, hoping that in return, they will read, comment, link-to and refer the posts. Garnering an audience relies on regular postings which refresh the content that lures in exchanges.

For those who think positively of the blogosphere, the relationship mediated between the author and the audience closely resembles similar tensions between private and public authorities in the public sphere. Those in-line with this perspective observe the larger voice composed from the multitude of blogs, and praise the landscape for establishing a framework which has re-opened public discussion and moved away from the commercial domination of contemporary media. Some of the best examples in stories which achieved national attention and recognition and that began in the blog environment. As Jürgen Habermas writes in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people coming together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” [27]

Others, in a contrasting manner, such as web writer and critic Andrew Keen, believe the blogosphere has cluttered public discussions with inconsequential information that not only blurs the line between what is good and bad, but does not allow for the clear exposition of true ideas. He states: In the digital world’s never-ending stream of unfiltered, user-generated content, things are indeed often not what they seem. Without editors, fact-checkers, administrators, or regulators to monitor what is being posted, we have no one to vouch for the reliability of credibility of the content we see… There are no gatekeepers to filter truth from fiction, genuine content from advertising, legitimate information from errors or outright deceit. Who is to point out the lies on the blogosphere that attempt to rewrite our history and spread rumors as fact? When we are all authors, and some of us are writing fiction, whom can we trust? [Keen 64-65]

This rhetoric over trust and truth is not blog specific, but consistent in conversations about the platform. On a philosophical level, Martin Heidegger, while talking about technology in general, address the importance truth plays in bringing us into a free relationship with that which concerns us. He says: “The correct always fixes upon something pertinent in whatever is under consideration. However, in order to be correct, this fixing by no means needs to uncover the thing in question in its essence. Only at the point where such an uncovering happens does the true come to pass. For that reason the merely correct is not yet the true. Only the true brings us into a free relationship with that which concerns us from out of its essence.” [Heidegger 6]

These contrasting perspectives on the blogosphere go from side to side, yet, what happens to these ideas when faced by a graveyard of digital information? What happens when, for example, one considers abandoned blogs? Could the blogging platform, as a framework, serve human beings who are subconsciously trying to express their most personal anxieties in hopes of providing some extension to their physical lives? I say yes. These sites are extending their authors’ sense of being long after they are gone. In a way these sites grant them immortality.

Before moving on, let us consider that for centuries, classical philosophy has talked about four causes: the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which something is made; the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; the causa finalis, the end; the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished. [Heidegger 6] Would the causa efficiens subconsciously motivate authors to publish in blogs in order achieve this immortality that we are talking about?

“I want to talk about the unique vital problem, that which dwells inside of us the most, that problem of our individual and personal destiny, of the immortality of the soul.” [24] So said Miguel de Unamuno, a late 19th Century and early 20th Century Spanish philosopher, thinker and writer who believed that inside each and every one of us there is a sentiment which, above all, desires immortality. Unamuno’s written legacy reveals a struggle between the ideas of reason and faith, where reason undoubtedly asserts that our life will undeniably come to an end and faith maneuvers within the feelings and hopes of one becoming eternal. “When doubt invades us and casts a shadow on our faith of the immortality of our soul, our determination for perpetuating our name and fame increases, with the hopes of achieving the slightest shade of any kind of immortality. And from here comes the incredible fight to identify as unique, to survive in some way in the memory of others and those to come… Everyone wants to affirm themselves, even if in appearance.” [Unamuno 70] For him, feelings cannot conceive of the self not in existence, yet the rational side asserts that there is no more being after death.

Bringing back the discussion to Heidegger who said: “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where…truth, happens.” [13] Would have Unamuno thought differently if he had been exposed to contemporary technologies where one’s representation can now outlive our physical condition? Would technology have revealed something to him?

This inescapable wait for the end of existence motivates explorations to try and overcome this fate. But what defines existence?

For 20th Century theologian Paul Tillich, it intrinsically involves both being and non-being. For him, “being has non-being ‘within’ itself” [Tillich 34]. Being, alone, “could not be the ground of life without non-being” [Tillich 179]. We just need a hint towards the possibility of non-being to affirm our self. Our true existence can only be uncovered by acknowledging the non-being that serves as a challenge to our self-affirmation: “being includes non-being and that through non-being it reveals itself” [Tillich 160]. Tillich also talks about how this relationship between being and non-being brings about anxiety in human beings. He says: “The anxiety of fate and death is most basic, most universal, and inescapable. All attempts to argue it away are futile. Even if the so-called arguments for the “immortality of the soul” had argumentative power (which they do not have) they would not convince existentially. For existentially everybody is aware of the complete loss of self which biological extinction implies. The unsophisticated mind knows instinctively what sophisticated ontology formulates: that reality has the basic structure of self-world correlation and that with the disappearance of the one side the world, the other side, the self, also disappears, and what remains is their common ground but not their structural correlation.” [Tillich 42] Yet again, mortality generates an anxiety that cannot be escaped and must be dealt with. In this digital age, the online realm, particularly the blogging platform, may provide an output to this feeling.

“The lesson of history is that there will be change in the fundamental realities of our lives associated with the transformation of the language apparatus, but this change is not determined in advance, and the specifics of equipment, institutionalization, and behaviors remain to be invented,” [xii] said English professor Gregory L. Ulmer who has written on how the online platform allows for a different and changing experience of private and public information. “The purpose of an [online page or portal] peripheral to an existing monument [human being] is to open to further thought the relation between private and public experience, individual and collective actions, events, behaviors. The premise of a conventional memorial is that the loss it commemorates is recognized as a sacrifice on behalf of a public, collective value.” We need to then: “inquire into this question of why some losses are recognized as sacrifices on behalf of the community while other, often much greater losses, are not granted collective status, so that their cumulative totals never register in the record of group identity as a price paid for the maintenance of a certain lifeworld.” [Ulmer 131]

Ulmer’s approach provides a framework to understand that there have been media in the past which have allowed for people to extend their being into contemporary times. Journals, diaries, maps, newspapers, letters, photo albums, and even art have always existed in relation to some existing monument, yet blogging’s success lies in that the infrastructure has been built for hyper-linking, sharing, commenting, exchanging and a never ending life. A blog’s presence on the world wide web instantly provides access to its content on a global scale, but what does it mean to have an online presence?

From a first impression, one could argue that in order for one’s online existence to be validated, all one needs to do is post content online which aids in the representation of the self behind the words. Having content online would be the equivalent of existing in the digital realm, of being. In the same line of thought, not posting any information could be observed as non-being. On a deeper look though, the behaviors of the online realm, as expected, articulate themselves differently from that of the analog world, especially when it comes to blogs. In the blogosphere, having online content does not equal presence. At the same time, presence does not equal existence. Participation here becomes the key. Posting, commenting, linking and referencing grant you life. Going back to Unamuno, blogs can be considered canvases where conversations between the rational self and the emotional condition can be harnessed. If we believe, like Unamuno, that we cannot conceive of the self not in existence, the activities on a personal blog help in defining a personal identity. Participation and interaction provide a sense of existence.

Going along with Unamuno, the rational self knows that after death there will be nothing more, yet the never ending nature of a blog challenges physical and natural destiny by granting eternal life after the author’s demise or abandonment. At this point, an author’s non-existence still can be interpreted as presence. The page keeps the author alive in the eyes of the spectators who come to the site. Borrowing from Tillich, being and non-being come into a conversation, but since non-being is within being, the lack of the author in a page that was once active rebuilds the author in the mind of those who visit the site again, granting them eternal existence. This behavior is nothing new. Previous physical media mentioned have similar effects. The key is the access and availability brought forth by the online environment and the intrinsic relationship to the built blogging platform and the exchanges promoted by it.

It may seem that there is an apparent contradiction in place about what it means to have presence online. Is it just having content or having to undergo participation? Consider the example of Theresa Duncan², an artist and dedicated blogger. She committed suicide in July of 2007, but before undergoing the act, she left two posts programmed to automatically come live on her blog once she was gone³. The reasons for her taking her own life are not certain, yet the public myth is that both she and her boyfriend were being harassed and stalked by a known religious group. Wether or not this is true or not, through the blog platform she was able, even after her death, to continue being and build on this myth. Even with her non-being, her presence persevered and outlasted the physical and biological nature of her human condition. Of course a debate could be made on the meaning of these later posts in relationship to the previous literature available on the site, but the overall impact shows how she refused, even after death, to dismiss her presence. She fought mortality even after her mortal reality had been proven. Another example, a case where ex-partners of a deceased person did not want the families to cancel online journals and social networking profiles so that they could post messages for the person to read from the afterlife. Remembrance is here furthered into a new way of extension. Through the presence of the previous posts, ex-partners can relieve the experience of the person, and through the new comments they are also externally extending her being. From the case shown in these examples, both participation or just static online content can mean presence to viewers of the sites depending on their relation to the subject behind the written word. Whichever the case you may be more inclined to, presence seems to extend beyond the physical constraints of the living.

I have tried to make that case that through an ever-lasting online presence, contemporary communication platforms can extend our sense of being, even after we are gone. Blogs are places where unique content can be deposited by the author, and according to German theorist Walter Benjamin, the aura of such content is precisely what gives it quality of authenticity, which cannot be reproduced. I speculate that such quality leads to a sense of being in the authors. As it was seen, human beings have an intrinsic need to question their mortality and are constantly in this search for a sense of being. In today’s digital world, biological and physical conditions may not be the major cause which determine the end of a living being’s presence. An online representation of physical selves can continue to survive through a person’s own very actions or from others that have stayed behind and still interact with the platform. No matter the case, blogging has affected the fundamental realities of our lives in just a mere ten years, and has, without ever intending, provided us an apparent extension of our lives. •

BIBLIOGRAPHY : main references : read all

de Unamuno, Miguel, Anthony Kerrigan, and Martin Nozick. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. Vol. 429. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Kline, David, et al. Blog! : How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture. New York: CDS Books, 2005.

Layder, Derek. Social and Personal Identity : Understanding Yourself. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004.

Rodzvilla, John, and Perseus Publishing. We’Ve Got Blog : How Weblogs are Changing our Culture. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub., 2002.

Tillich, Paul. The Courage to be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952.

BIBLIOGRAPHY : secondary references : read parts

Bausch, Paul, Matthew Haughey, and Meg Hourihan. We Blog : Publishing Online with Weblogs. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2002.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 1st MIT Press pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Garland Pub., 1977.

Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur : How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture. New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007.

Keren, Michael. Blogosphere : The New Political Arena. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.

Riegler, Alexander, Markus F. Peschl, and Astrid von Stein. Understanding Representation in the Cognitive Sciences : Does Representation Need Reality?. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 1999.

Riverbend. Baghdad Burning : Girl Blog from Iraq. 1st Feminist Press ed. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005.

Serfaty, Viviane. The Mirror and the Veil : An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs. Vol. 11. Amsterdam ; New York: Rodopi, 2004.

Smokler, Kevin. Bookmark Now : Writing in Unreaderly Times. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Stone, Biz. Who Let the Blogs Out? : A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004.

Ulmer, Gregory L. Electronic Monuments. Vol. 15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Walsh, Bob. Clear Blogging : How People Blogging are Changing the World and how You can Join them. Berkeley, CA; New York: Apress; Distributed to the book trade worldwide by Springer-Verlag New York, 2007.

BIBLIOGRAPHY : terciary references : read or glanced at few segments

Burden, Matthew Currier. The Blog of War : Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. 1st Simon & Schuster pbk. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2006.

Dawes, Brendan. Analog in, Digital Out : Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2007.

Harris, Frances Jacobson. I found it on the Internet : Coming of Age Online. Chicago: American Library Association, 2005.

Hewitt, Hugh. Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation that’s Changing Your World. Nashville, Tenn.: T. Nelson Publishers, 2005.

Holmes, Ashley Joyce. Web Logs in the Post-Secondary Writing Classroom., 2005.

Riverbend. Baghdad Burning II : More Girl Blog from Iraq. 1st Feminist Press ed. New York: Feminist Press, 2006.

Scoble, Robert, and Shel Israel. Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2006.

Tremayne, Mark. Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media. London: Routledge, 2007.
White, Michele. The Body and the Screen : Theories of Internet Spectatorship. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.

Now that we say more of our selves, are we saying less?

In 2006, for the first time in history, the Canadian National Census questionnaire made its way to the country’s 32.5 million residents. It included a new confidentiality question that asked Canadians to approve or disapprove of their personal information being included in the census. Historians feared that survey participants did not realize the importance of the option and initiated a publicity campaign to educate the country on the implications of such question, and on why people should care about it even though this census is released to the public in 2098. It was an education on how the information will be useful then, specially in regards to identity and the social way of living.

Contemporary digital environments have allowed a re-thinking of our selves and of how we relate, connect and present to/with others. The popularity of digital social networking sites, instant messaging platforms, discussion forums, email, the emergence of the blog as a publishing tool, collaborative online games, and live digital worlds like Second Life have transmuted the way personal identity is thought of and handled.

Online environments allow the users to digitally curate their own lives. The creation of these selves is managed through text, images and as of recently, video. Users can write/post/upload any information they want. Further depth can be achieved by having the digital content annotated, commented and further developed by others. This process is reciprocal in nature, for users can simultaneously act as others, commenting and annotating content. Someone’s digital public image is the product of the sum of individual interventions and social contributions. Personal and external texts are illustrating the image of who we become in a digital realm². Therefore, we exist by implication.

In the digital realm there is no longer a singular visible self, but a sum of many different selves created from a plurality of options available by the simultaneous participation in various digital social platforms. What we do, where we are, and who we are in real life have no bearing on what others now learn about ourselves (unless we want them to). We constantly juggle between who we are and what we digitally allow others to see or know about us.

This split has extended to the social and cultural spheres. The physical world is no longer a unique reality. The digital environment has developed a life of its own. People can now have a digital life, even though it must still be framed to biologically respond to the impulses and needs generated by their physical self, and this new social being allows people to externalize themselves in an ideological manner in as many digital ways as wanted (or needed).

The social migration to the digital pluralization of the self raises concerns over the implications of such a shift to generations that follow. Digital information is not tangible information. In these digital realms, we don’t have original paintings, but digital creations from which multiple originals can be made. Our cemeteries and burial grounds are now inactive web pages and broken links. Scrolls and documents do not have weight or presence. These cannot be dusted for no dust falls on magnetic streams of information that cannot be seen or touched. The tactile world is being deposited into an abstract and ungraspable set of ideas. Identity is moving along too as part of the crowd.

What kind of mark, if any, is being left for others to decode once we are gone? What part of us will we leave for others to know who we were? How will the future handle so many of one? Will there be a way to understand that many can be the same one? Will we be able to leave a legacy if who we are may not be clear?

In 1976, two paleoanthropologists led by anthropologist Mary Leakey, found, not far from the village of Laetoli in Tanzania, two pairs of footprint fossils that challenged the existing human evolutionary framework. The discovery, as any of this nature, fuelled much debate. Some argue the footprints were made by early hominids who resembled contemporary humans in stride and standing posture, in which case this would represent the earliest proof of bipedal locomotion in the archaeological record. Merely from these marks, information about posture, stance, height and weight of their makers has been deduced. Other professionals, rooting their argument on the historical and artifactual record, challenge the idea that Laetoli marks were made by possible ancestors since there is no evidence of human culture or intelligence during the time period to which the fossils are being credited to. It is of no particular importance to this essay if the footprints actually date as far as the discoverers argue, but the fact that a debate exists over some physical marks left in the ground millions of years ago. There is tangible evidence that can be studied and talked about. What really matters is that a legacy was left behind.

We know of early pre-historic hunting strategies from the Lascaux Cave drawings. We study Egyptian pharaohs and their burial techniques because we were able to find mastabas, pyramids, temples and scrolls. We can imagine the Loch Ness Monster because we have seen blurry images. To Catholics, Jesus Christ is God, not human, because it was so decided, and we have proof, through the documents from the Council of Nicea. We can visualize Jesus’ face because we have seen it in the Turin Shroud. Stonehenge is an international mystery because of the unexplainable rocks still standing in its space. We believe man has visited the moon because we all have seen the video of it. As the digitalization of society pluralizes and infects every aspect of our daily lives, how will later people know about us?

One of our basic human acts is that of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves with a place that belongs to us, and to which we belong. Context is important. We use it in the development and management of understanding our identity. We are good evaluating and deciphering the information handed to us as we experience the physical world around us. The digital world thus presents an interesting challenge: there is no actual space around us. Virtual space is somewhere, just not here or there. We cannot be in it. It cannot be around us. We do not exist in it. We can only control a representation of ourselves.

People are visually mapping new creations of/for themselves.

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace provide personal homepages (that become altars to the ideal self) as templates for the users people to fill-in and let others know about who they are. The content on these pages is becoming a sort of social truth, empowering users to make whatever they want of themselves. We can become what we pretend to be. For some, this is the opportunity to be someone they had always wished of being or to become their ideal selves. For others, this is a unique way in which they can explore the possible self that they can never be or to behave in ways they never thought possible.

In one such case, a girl was impregnated in a one-night stand and due to the strict beliefs and traditional values of the family, ended up engaged to the father of her yet to born child. She, in order to avoid her reality, used her Facebook profile to show others how happy she was with her engagement and her future marriage. She posted photos, texts and videos of herself and a guy (whom she lovingly referred to as her boyfriend) showing off the engagement ring without ever mentioning the coming child. In real life she was impregnated, in digital life she is happily engaged.

In another example, companies now research social networking sites before hiring potential new employees. There has been the case of a person, whom upon attending a job interview, had to talk about annotations made to some photographs of him drunk displayed on his Facebook page. He may or may not be drunk every weekend, but the employer just has to read the comments left by some of the friends on certain photographs to get the wrong impression.

Virtual worlds like Second Life, contrary to the previous examples, build on a framework of disembodied visual, audial and tactile exchanges. In this alternate reality, those who choose to join the service are asked to create an avatar, or a visual digital representation of their own creation, which can be whatever their imagination allows: a man, a woman, a cat, or a human dressed as a dragon³. Once the avatar is ready (by the user’s wishes), he (maybe now a she) or she (maybe now a he) can have it teleport through three-dimensional spaces where it can communicate with other avatars, own money, be part of an economical system, purchase virtual land, build property, own material artifacts, attend concerts, stay in hotels, have sexual relations, be run over by a car and not die, swim without the necessity of air, or even get married. The avatar can be made to have a complete life of its own.

The extent to which the participation in these social environments enables us to establish a self that contains meaning is questionable. The digital realm voids the human experience of physical presence or permanence. We have no point of reference on any person we meet in these digital spaces. We cannot grasp how much of the physical self is evident in these digital recreations. There is no understanding of the relationship of this digital persona and the physical counterpart that is communicating through it. As in the case of the person whose photo annotations were brought up in a job interview, there is no real way of knowing if his friends exaggerated, if they were telling the truth or simply being funny. When facing Second Lifers, the relationship between avatar and creator multiplies intentional ambiguities before our eyes⁴. We are not really there, even though we are there⁵. This second life, as any other digital experience, creates no physical record of events that take place, which represents a dilemma since leaving a mark is an important part of human nature.

What is interesting is the example of the person who divorced her husband because he had married in Second Life. We have no physical proof or evidence of this act, the husband has never met the Second Life wife (we don’t even know if she is a woman) in real life, yet the digital world has drifted and caused a mark in the physical environment that has no real explanation outside of the digital context.

As the digitalization of society pluralizes and infects every aspect of our daily lives, some projects are reconnecting the digital sphere with the physical world that created it.

In the culture of Geocaching, members geo-annotate a physical space with a message for others to track and find. Every one of these personal annotations boils down to marking in relationship to presence. This space now has information that allows others to decipher who was there or why they were there: “This is the place where he proposed”; “I’m a tourist and really having a great time”; “I lost a bet, as part of my payoff I have to mark the spot where….” If the coordinates of one of these geo-annotations were to be tracked down, one would find a physical artifact marking the proof that someone was there before.

The Yellow Arrow project is trying to create a global public art community that uses the digital world to annotate the physical one. In this project, stickers in the shapes of arrows are left by people to “point what counts” in their own respect in the physical environment. One can choose to point to anything personally interesting. Once decided, one places the sticker on the environment and dials a special number printed on it. This allows for a text-message annotation. Someone else can then go by, dial the number, and receive the recorded annotation. The arrows serve as captions to things that people may not necessarily pay attention to. Locations are then recorded on a website where people can go to and read the annotations.

Esquire Magazine’s The Napkin Project goes out into the physical environment to collect and bring back stories by people, in a bar somewhere, scribbling on a napkin. This person is writing the kind of story/list/note that might be crammed in a pocket and pulled out years later to tell something deep and forgotten. In this effort, Esquire has asked a variety of authors who are now used to writing or publishing digitally to submit handwritten stories on a napkin. This project uses analogue techniques to create narratives that are shared digitally with others.

These three previous examples serve as case studies for the relationships between digital and physical realms, but most importantly, about how people are interested in leaving an individual personal statement. These are efforts in which, even though the digital expression is present, the importance lies on the physical mark being left behind.

Individuals want to be remembered. This behavior is part of our human traits. We have always, whether in an intentional or unintentional manner, strived to make ourselves known. Our current perceptions of identity cannot deny the amalgam between our physical selves and our digital representations of our self. This relationship only leads to making this inchoate digital identity more real. The digital creation (or creations since there is an opportunity here to create more than one of us) takes life. In the near future, one will bring the digital selves at all times and as Sterling recognizes, “…we want to know what the thing looks like at every stage of its lifecycle, not just when its fresh from its shrink-wrap and styrofoam blocks⁶.” There will be an interest in all its aspects and on how it relates to us.

Our individuality is a construction that takes place through ideology, language, and representation. Today, users have the ability (and choice) to communicate with others from different, possibly global locations. Contemporary relationships are no longer necessarily based on territorial restrictions, rather in electronic associations that transcend physical frameworks. Online has become a way to experience this individuality. It is now feeling in-line. Interaction and sharing (of various kinds) take place with others unknown to us. We establish connections. We create abstract lives.

Contemporary digital realms, be they social networking sites or worlds like Second Life, allow for a feeling of individuality in all of us, yet they minimize the physical impact we shall have for future generations. In 4 million years, will someone be able to find a trace of who we are today? If we continue on this path of digital self-identification, our physical identity will decrease while our digital self will grow. Computer game players sometimes talk about their real selves as a composite of their characters and talk about their screen personae as means for working on their real lives, but for future historians every person will then become a puzzle that needs to be deciphered and evaluated, but lets not delve into such a distant future yet, for it used to be that archaeologists were those uniquely interested with understanding what came before us. It was them who worried with digging up for clues, answers and history, but contemporary socialscapes have mutated. As we move towards a more stable and profound idea of the digital self, we will all need to become digital archaeologists to decipher and understand as much as we can about the people with whom we are interacting online.

References

Bailenson, Jeremy N., et al. “Transformed Social Interaction: Decoupling Representation from Behavior and Form in Collaborative Virtual Environments.” Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 13.4 (2004): 428-41.

Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Bernet, Rudolf. “The Traumatized Subject.” Research in Phenomenology 30 (2000): 160-79.

Esquire Magazine. The Napkin Project. 24 Sep. 2007. 14 Nov. 2007.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1st American ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

—. This is Not a Pipe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Freud, Sigmund, et al. The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 54. Chicago: William Benton, 1952.

Geonotes. Digital Graffiti in Public Spaces. 2002. 24 Nov. 2007.

Hill, Melvyn A. “The Silence of the Body.” Journal of Religion & Health 43.1 (2004): 29-43.

Institute for the Future. Why People Will Geo-annotate Physical Space. 22 Oct. 2004. 20 Nov. 2007.

Kingsbury, Paul. “The Extimacy of Space.” Social cultural geography 8.2 (2007): 235.

Kirchner, Jake. “Your Identity Will be Digital.” PC Magazine 18.12 (1999): 142.

Lessig, Lawrence. Code. Version 2.0 ed. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Maney, Kevin. The King of Alter Egos Is Surprisingly Humble Guy. Creator of Second Lifeís Goal? Just to Reach People. 05 Feb. 2007. 02 Nov. 2007.

Powell, Kimberly. Will You Be Remembered in 2098? 8 May 2006. 2 Nov. 2007.

Salmi, Mario. Masaccio: Brancaccio Chapel, church of San Maria del Carmine. Milan: Amilcare Pizzi Art Publications, 1950.

Salvatore, Bryan. “Leaving a Mark.” National geographic traveler 10.6 (1993): 44. .

Schroeder, Ralph, Ann-Sofie Axelsson, and Wartime Classes Golden Anniversary Endowment. Avatars at Work and Play : Collaboration and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments. Vol. 34. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006.

Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

Tanizaki, Jun´ichiro. In praise of shadows. New Haven: Leeteís Island Books, 1977.

Thompson, M. Guy. “The Way of Authenticity and the Quest for Personal integrity1,2.” European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health 7.3 (2005): 143-57.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen : Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Van de Vijver, Gertrudis. “The Role of Anticipation in the Constitution of the Subject.” AIP Conference Proceedings 517.1 (2000): 161.

Windley, Phillip J. Digital Identity. Sebastopol, CA: OíReilly, 2005.

Wurman, Richard Saul, et al. Information Anxiety 2. Indianapolis, Ind.: Que, 2001.

“The human experience of identity has two elements:
a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate.²”

Our shadows played together as we walked, yet I am not able to tell you about it.

In 1976, two paleoanthropologists in a group led by anthropologist Mary Leakey, found, not far from the village of Laetoli in Tanzania, two pairs of fossils which today question the nature of those that existed before us. The discovery, as any of this nature, fuelled much debate. Some argue that the fossils, in fact footprints, were made by early hominids who resemble contemporary humans in stride and standing posture, while others, rooting their argument on the historical and artifactual record, challenge the idea that Laetoli marks were made by early iterations of us since there is no evidence of human culture or intelligence during that time period.

For the believers, it was Australopithecus Afarensis who strolled throughout Africa as early as 3.9 to as late as 3 million years ago and left his or her legacy for us to find. The discovery has been crucial to the field of anthropology in that if early humans indeed made the footprints, these represent the earliest proof of bipedal locomotion in the archaeological record. One thing is clear though, if it was in fact Australopithecus who left his or her marks, it could walk but could not talk. Skull casts of other skeletons discovered and dated to the same time period indicate that such development had no yet happened. The brain was still much like that of a chimpanzee and the talking ability was still not developed.

I just realized I don’t have a shadow and I can tell you about it.

In 1992, Neal Stephenson wrote Snow Crash, a cyberpunk genre novel where he coined the idea of the metaverse to describe what today we know and refer to as an online virtual space. The creation of this digital world and the complex way in which it related to the real world described in the narrative, later inspired Philip Rosedale, an internet entrepreneur, to launch the virtual world Second Life.

The environment had two main ideas driving its inception. The first is that it was built as an alternate existence that was modeled by its residents. There is no overarching force dictating that details of what this world can be. A second driving idea may be the most powerful: “other than chat rooms, much of the Internet is devoid of people. If you’re shopping on Amazon.com, you have no idea if you’re alone or if 20,000 other people are there at the same time. There’s no way to notice if you and another shopper are looking at the same product, and start up a conversation about it. Eventually, Internet users might go to Amazon through Second Life instead of through a browser, walking into the Amazon store and interacting with shoppers and clerks³.” Second Life is a more people-minded interphase to travel the world wide web.

The project, which began in 2003, is today “inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe⁴”. In this alternate reality, those who choose to join the service are asked to create an avatar, or a visual digital representation of their own choosing (or as many different ones as they wish⁵), which can be whatever the imagination allows: a man, a woman, a cat, a human dressed as a dragon. Once the avatar is ready (by the user’s wishes), he (maybe now a she) or she (maybe now a he) can have it teleport through three-dimensional spaces where it can communicate to other avatars, own money, purchase virtual land, build property, own material artifacts, attend concerts, stay in hotels, have sexual relations, or even get married. One observation of this alternate existence: our human avatars cast no shadows. We are shadow-less beings in a lit world.

You were not able to talk, yet we know much about you | we can talk, yet we know nothing about each other.

In the Laetoli breakthrough, the discovery includes two pairs of footprints walking side by side. Not just one pair. We have the physical marks of two beings, possibly human, who could not talk with each other, yet they were able to come together and stroll next to each other. “Jacques Lacan coined the neologism ‘extimacy’ in order to theorize two interrelated modes of psychical apprehension: first, how our most intimate feelings can be extremely strange and other to us. Second, how our feelings can be radically externalized on to objects without losing their sincerity and intensity”.⁶Physical proximity must have allowed for some kind of non-verbal interaction to occur between these two hominids. We can infer this from the stamps they left in the ground that provide proof of their encounter and existence.

Second Life, on the contrary, builds on a framework of disembodied visual and audial exchanges. Users have the ability (and choice) to communicate with others but are doing so from different, possibly global locations. We have no point of reference on any person we meet there. “How drastically can a person change and still remain, in the eyes of either themselves or their peers, the same person?⁷” How little change could be made and provoke the opposite? When facing Second Lifers, the relationship between avatar and creator “multiplies intentional ambiguities before our eyes.⁸” This lack of context is then added to the reality of not being side-by-side with one another. We are not really there, even though we are there⁹. This Second Life experience creates no physical record of events that take place, yet Barthes could argue that “myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no ‘substantial’ ones,” and by just creating and communicating with these avatars within Second Life we are already creating a myth for ourselves, hence leaving a record.

Bruce Sterling, on the other hand, in his futuristic look in Shaping Things, looks into human identity and anticipates that coming generations will “…like to have some coherent ideas about the demographics of every one who interacts in any way whatsoever”. They will not be interested in “pigeon-holding people inside demographics” but what will be of interest to them will be “when people transit across demographics. A rural fundamentalist who somehow moves to a foreign country, triples her income and is now a refined international diplomat– she sounds like someone we might want to talk to”. Considering Barthes’ view, we may be creating a record of ourselves, but in reality, avatars are still not allowing us to know much, or what we would want to know, about their creators.

“Power is tolerable only on the condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.¹⁰”

A great deal of what we know comes from what others left behind.

In 2006, for the first time in history, the Canadian National Census questionnaire made its way to the country’s 32.5 million residents with a new confidentiality question that asked to approved or disapproved of their personal information being included in the census. “Many genealogists and historians feared that survey participants didn’t realize the importance of saying “yes,” and initiated a publicity campaign to educate people on the implications of the confidentiality question, and on why Canadians should care about what happens almost a century from now, in the year 2098, when the 2006 census is released to the public.¹¹” Why should we care what happens 90 years from today? Why does it matter? Saying no would be like living without a shadow.

We know of early pre-historic hunting strategies from the Lascaux Cave drawings. Egyptian pharaohs and their burial techniques are studied today because we were able to find mastabas, pyramids, temples and scrolls. We can imagine the Loch Ness Monster because we have seen blurry images. To Catholics, Jesus Christ is God, not human, because there was a Council of Nicea and we can imagine him because we can see the Turin Shroud. Stonehenge is an international mystery because there are unexplainable rocks still standing. We believe man has visited the moon because we have seen a video of it. In all of these cases, the importance lies in that the “objects no longer perhaps possess a power, but they certainly possess meanings¹².”

Why is it that for most of society biography is destiny?

Let’s consider the culture of geocaching. What drives its members to geo-annotate a physical space? “Every one of these personal geo-annotations boils down to “I was here” or “You are here¹³”. It has to do with marking in relationship to presence. This space now has information that allows others to decipher who was there or why they were there: “This is the place where he proposed”; “I’m a tourist and really having a great time”; “I lost a bet, as part of my payoff I have to mark the spot where….”

It is of further interest the way individuals want to be remembered and how they leave marks for others to interpret in relation to their personal identity. “Ever wished to pull out a pen and write an angry message on the wall next to you? Do you enjoy observing and participating in toilet graffiti”¹⁴? This urge is neither recent nor contemporary. It is part of our human condition. We have always, whether in an intentional or unintentional manner, strived at making ourselves known. It used the archaeologists who were those uniquely interested with understanding what came before us. It was them who were worried with digging up the past for clues, answers and history, but contemporary socialscapes have mutated. This idea of marking and decoding the mark has shifted from an academic panorama into a social trend, and technological improvements have paved the way for this move.

The them, the me and the mine

Richard Saul Wurman believes that “we learn through context, through what surrounds, informs, and opposes an idea¹⁵.” From his understanding, people seek conversations with the interest or purpose to exchange information. Through communicating with others, exchange of words and ideas takes place.

Recent improvements in digital communications provide a stable framework for this exchange to exist on a more regular and stable manner. The contemporary physical world is becoming more digital and so are we. Our current perceptions of identity cannot deny the amalgam between our physical selves and our digital representations of our self. This relationship will only lead to making this inchoate digital identity more real. Your digital creation (or creations since there is an opportunity here to create more than one of us) will take life. You will take it with you at all times¹⁶ and as Sterling recognizes, “…we want to know what the thing looks like at every stage of its lifecycle, not just when its fresh from its shrink-wrap and styrofoam blocks¹⁷”. We will be interested in all its aspects.

“Extending one’s sense of self in the form of abstract representation is one of our most fundamental expressions of humanity.¹⁸”

We exist by implication

Contemporary digital environments have allowed a re-thinking of our selves and of how we relate, connect and present with others. The emergence and popularity of social networking sites in the Internet brought about new perspectives to the ideological sphere of personal identity. In 1995 came Classmates.com. In 2002 we had Friendster. In 2003 MySpace showed up and in 2004 Facebook appeared as a private experiment, only to then go public in 2006. The popularity of these platforms grew exponentially, with many of the users profiling themselves in more than one of them at the same time.

These sites have in common that they allow users to digitally curate their own lives in respect to the physical social relationships they are entailed in. Users can post content about themselves and have it annotated by others, while at the same time, others can publish information about them (which in return, they could also annotate). In other words, the curation takes place through the implications of these messages¹⁹. The creation of this digital self takes place through text, images and as of recently, video. As Barthes’ said “pictures become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful: like writing, they call for a lexis²⁰”. People are visually mapping new creations of themselves²¹. Computer game players sometimes talk about their real selves as a composite of their characters and talk about their screen personae as means for working on their real lives.

In this digital curation most of the communication and growth relies on the captioning of information. Users post messages, images or videos and others can annotate, comment, verify, disprove, lie or fantasize with them. Personal and external texts illustrate the images²². “Sometimes, however, the text produces (invents) an entirely new signified which is retroactively projected into the image, so much so as to appear denoted there… Sometimes too, the text can even contradict the image so as to produce a compensatory connotation²³”. Jungian ideas stressed that the self is a meeting place of diverse archetypes. The sum of all annotation creates this digital social being.

How do the younger generations deal with this? Let’s consider a being totally un-oriented in the contemporary world. What does it mean for it to identify itself as something with an internal cohesion? It means that this being needs to find an orientation in the world, that is, it needs to make a distinction between an inside and an outside. How shall it know that there are things that belong to itself and things that are outside of the scope of its being? A crucial question is what will be the element that is likely to reveal to it its nature, its place in the world; or in other words, what will the living being recognize itself in?

Freud had in this regard a quite interesting proposition that is useful for our purposes. In Instincts and their vicissitudes he states: “Let us imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost entirely helpless living organism, as yet unoriented in the world, which is receiving stimuli in its nervous substance. This organism will very soon be in a position to make a first distinction and a first orientation. On the one hand, it will be aware of stimuli that can be avoided by muscular action: these it ascribes to an external world. On the other hand, it will also be aware of stimuli against which such action is of no avail and whose character of constant pressure persists in spite of it; these stimuli are the signs of an internal world, the evidence of instinctual needs. The perceptual substance of the living organism will thus have found in the efficacy of its muscular activity a basis for distinguishing between an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’.”

“…Tomorrow’s tomorrow–is neither an object nor a person. It’s a Biot, which we can define as an entity which is both object and person.²⁴?

The present’s future relies on today’s digital shadows

Context is important. We use it in the development and management of who we are.  We are good at understanding, evaluating and deciphering the information handed to us as we experience the physical world. The digital world thus presents an interesting challenge: there is no space for us to leave our marks.

In 4 million years, will someone be able to find a trace of who we are today? If we continue on this path of digital self-identification, how will we resonate in the physical world? How will be transcend in a world where transcending and improving technologies might archive or out write us? How will we be able to search back? Will there be a possibility of discovery? A chance for surprise?

As the digitalization of society pluralizes and infects every aspect of our daily lives, some projects are reconnecting the digital sphere with the physical world that created it. The importance of leaving a physical mark is still present.

Esquire Magazine’s The Napkin Project, a project completely based on an traditional story of someone, in a bar somewhere, scribbling on a napkin in the failing afternoon light; the kind of story or list or note that might be crammed in a pocket and pulled out years later to tell something deep and forgotten, perhaps life’s most intimate first chapter, nearly lost forever. This digital project uses analogue techniques to create narratives that are shared digitally with others, yet the physical mark has been made. In truth, the server that holds the project could break down and the information could be lost, yet the originals are probably somewhere, archived, with the potential of being discovered years from now.

The Yellow Arrow project is trying to create a global public art community that uses the digital world to annotate the physical one. In this project, the arrows left by people “point what counts” in their own respect. The arrows serve as captions to things that people may not necessarily pay attention to.

Both of these projects talk to us. There is something about the handling of the relationship of the digital and physical worlds that allow us interact with them at multiple levels. Most importantly, both projects leave marks that can be picked up by others later.

“Hence, knowing that a system which takes over the signs of another system in order to make them its signifiers is a system of connotation, we may say immediately that the literal message is denoted and the symbolic image connoted.²⁵”

Transcending today

Social networks do not talk back at us. It’s other users within these frameworks that do. This situation creates a new set of rules that implicate what identity means in a digital space. Our identity, in this scenario, is dictated by others with whom you are related in the physical world. In realms such as Second Life, identity is managed differently. We create our own avatar, but no information is given back to us about what the creation means or implicates. We can become what we pretend to be. For some, this is the opportunity to be someone they had always wished of being. For others, this is a unique way in which they can explore new that they can never be or to behave in ways they never thought possible.

Jake Kirchner, in the article Your Identity Will Be Digital, discusses how biometrics can measure unique individual characteristics well beyond fingerprints. Individual attributes of your face are measured by themselves and in relationship to one another, creating a complex digitized mathematical model. This, along with the reality that every person’s iris and retinal patterns are unique and can be scanned like a human barcode and that the geometry of your hand, patterns of veins in your wrist, and the map of your pores can be used as unique digital identifiers begs us to question if our identities will become models. Will I become numbers or patterns for the future generations?

Our individuality is a construction that takes place through ideology, language, and representation. How can we, as individuals, leave our own marks to be identified or remembered later? Then again, maybe all I have to do is leave my footprints in the sand…

Architecture can aid my understanding of balance (specially when it comes to grid work and the alignment of elements), it can fuel my understanding of the different ways my work will affect others, and it can be a catalyst for three dimensional explorations of a basically two dimensional area of study. Graphic design can influence him by improving his communications, by opening a space to create strategical standpoint for the conceptual exploration of aesthetic representations, and in providing a typographical groundwork on which to develop a new layer of expressive meaning.

Wether we both liked it or not, in many instanced, we eventually concluded that our disciplines, to the majority out there, are basically a luxury. People do not really need us to live their lives. A building is not going to fall down because the engineer executed it without the architect. A person is not going to not read a letter because the font in the body copy does not match that of the letterhead. In the end, we are an added value.

A key difference between architecture and graphic design? Even though, to some extent, both disciplines are an indulgence, you need a big capital to produce the final project in architecture. You have to build the house to finish the project. Graphic design’s ephemeral nature a diversity of expressive mediums basically requires no budget to be good. You can draw with chalk on

When it comes to graphic design, we are not charged for the amount of ink on a page. We are not charge for the size on a screen. We are not charged for alignment. We are not charged for including 1 or 12 typefaces. We are not charged for balance. In reality, without any kind of extra investment over our regular tools, we are capable of producing good graphic design.

Ok, before you jump out of the seat to comment violently on this, I realize that many great graphic design ideas require budgets for better production and programming. I do not dispute that. All my father and I have pondered about is that once we have our basic tools, executing good architecture will always require a certain amount of money, while great graphic design can happen with little or almost no extra monetary influx.

Think about this when you encounter your next project. Where could you get?

Welcome back to another segment of Who’s pica is it anyway?

] For this segment the rules are simple: a random person of the crowd will yell out a theme for two of our improv graphic designers to execute. Then, remember those little paper pieces that were handed to you at the beginning of the show? Those papers where you could write whatever you wanted on? Well, every 15 seconds, our improvisers will incorporate one of these statements into the overall dialogue. (If you later decide to go online and download the transcript, we will include the nicknames of those who submitted statements.) Let’s begin!

_Master of ceremonies_ Our improvisers for the night are girgen29 & pirindinga. Anyone have a theme in mind?

] not even a second went by and a voice from the side of the room yelled empowerment (crispygonzo) [

_Master of ceremonies_ Let’s give our improvisers three minutes to get ready.

…

] The improv graphic designers reach the stage, dressed in black jeans and a black t-shirt. The stage is painted in white and there is a grass green three-seat sofa in the middle. Pirindinga sits on the right side of it, pretending to watch TV. Girgen29 comes in from the left side of the stage yelling angrily. [

_girgen29_ Sebastian… Where are you? Sebastian. Sebastian!

_pirindinga_ Wow, come on honey, why the yelling? There’s no need to inform half the neighborhood that you are furious about something.

_girgen29_ Me? Furious? You have never seen me furious. Who gave you the power to bet our home on your silly poker game?

_pirindinga_ That’s why you are all pissed off? Ah, and I thought it was something important. I did not loose the house. You know how good I am.

_girgen29_ That’s not the point! What if you would have lost? What if, for the first time, you were not able to beat the other? What if tonight we were sleeping on the sidewalk?

_pirindinga_ And what if that had happened. Have you ever thought that maybe we can loose everything and still feel alive? (pirindinga)

_girgen29_ Alive? You wanna feel alive?!? Think about me standing on top of you and jumping like crazy (michewkf). That will make you feel alive.

] girgen29 sits at the opposite side of the couch from pirindinga [

_pirindinga_ Actually, you know what would make me feel a alive right now? A giant cup of coffee (martyclane).

_girgen29_ What does that have do with anything we are talking about?

_pirindinga_ Well, I saw you giving me this subliminal attitude by sitting down and crossing your legs (munozmatt).

_girgen29_ Ja! At least you got the sugar coated (requiredwhen) message.

] pirindinga turns towards the television [

_pirindinga_ Holy Shit!!! That guy is about to burn 1,000,000 dollars (pirindinga). Now that is power.

_girgen29_ You moron. That’s no power, that’s just plain stupidity. You wanna feel power? Think about a reptile about to bite you on the ankle and you don't have any anti-venom (k3llissima) and you still decide to fight it.

_pirindinga_ Listen Roxy, thank you for not crossing your legs (martyclane) anymore.

_girgen29_ Leave me alone Sebastian. I want to feel about this conversation like if I were a red haired girl forgetting him. (kat6128)

_pirindinga_ Wait a minute! What are you talking about now. You are making no sense.

_girgen29_ No sense is feeling like if was exposing the walls of your house so you could imagine it differently (girgen29), no sense would be telling you that I will run this household because I bought a gun (requiredwhen), no sense would be to tell you that I slept with a midget that could make a living in Vegas!!! (robertruehlman)

_pirindinga_ Oh please Roxy, you know that with a gun or no gun, you hate being the boss (martyclane) of the house. You are not meant for so much power.

] furiously, girgen29 walks out of the house pretending to be walking on the freshly-painted crosswalk (k3llissima) Pirindinga, still inside of the home is stretching really tall and saying "i am sooooooo big!!!" (munozmatt). [

_Master of ceremonies_ 3 hours later

_pirindinga_ Where were where you?

_girgen29_ I went to see a hard boiled detective in a confessional (kat6128).

_pirindinga_ So you went to see a priest.

_girgen29_ Listen, I felt like a was going to land a hammer to someone’s head (girgen29), so let me be in peace. Actually, this priestess suggested that we should write on a blank sheet of paper (rebeccateg) all the reasons for me being the female boss (martyclane) this week.

_pirindinga_ That’s like me taking over the world and banning smoking? (michewkf) Or me smoking up some drugs? (requiredwhen)

_girgen29_ It is more like a soft pink truth (kat6128) as part of some truth campaigns (martyclane) and your capacity to understand it is like a hidden world in a tree (rebeccateg)… Non-existent!!!

_pirindinga_ Listen. I apologize for all of this. I see that it was wrong of me not to ask first. I am sorry I bet our home. I did it knowing how to design myself out of the box (munozmatt). The other players just did not expect it.

_girgen29_ This conversation is full of sand in a bottle (samyulaim). There is no satisfaction from exchanges like these. It’s like taking back your favorite purse that your sister stole (girgen29) and realizing that you really did not need it.

_pirindinga_ Ok, so the blue pill (kat6128) it is, not the red pill (kat6128). We never fought.  Let’s get a pen and paper (requiredwhen) and see what we are going to do with the money I won in the match.

_girgen29_ While we do that, have you met the new neighbors? They are from Puerto Rico, so you know, loud, annoying and obnoxious, but I heard them talking about partying in Puerto Rico and about serving only liquor at bars (michewkf). Why not go to vacation there? Let me get chisel-edged sharpies (k3llissima) to make a table of pros and cons.

_pirindinga_ Go to the beach in Puerto Rico? I’d have to turn into a christian bodybuilder ripping a phone book in half (robertruelhman) to be able to attract the ladies down there… jejejeje. I know its all about teaching (martyclane) oneself, but come on, my physique is as interesting as a silent radio (rebeccateg).
_girgen29_ It is simpler than you think. Just sit next to a blow up doll (pirindinga) with a middle eastern spice (kat6128) to it and you will get all the attention you crave.

_pirindinga_ jejeje Very true honey. But in full honestly here, all I do on a weekly basis is take a sharpie to the walls of a bathroom stall (girgen29) and I make faces that look like me (martyclane) or that look like Nature Boy Rick Flair (k3llissima)  as a dog beating the snot out of a cat (munozmatt). That grants me all the attention I need.

_girgen29_ Whatever gets you through the day my love, whatever gets you through the day.

_pirindinga_ Hey, why don’t we go out for dinner? Don’t give me that face. Yes, dinner, right now. Get some shoes… let’s go.

] they exit on the left side of the stage [

_Master of ceremonies_ They are now driving down Hollywood Blvd.

_pirindinga_ Honey, remember that restaurant that looked like a church (martyclane)… want to eat there?

_girgen29_ …

_pirindinga_ Ok, I know, it looked like peach poodles skipping (rebeccateg) and like a school (martyclane) but…

_pirindinga_ Holy Shit did you see that? Oh my god!

_girgen29_ What? What?

_pirindinga_ There was a large van that looked like a tank full of Canadians (requiredwhen) and it looked like they were about to open can of Whoop Ass (k3llissima)

_Master of ceremonies_ At that moment she realized that it was her last option to kill him or leave him (kat6128) while driving in front of a building that looked like a mall (martyclane).

_girgen29_ Sebastian, I see you and I imagine you at 98 and still rocking (michewkf) and that’s one of the things I mostly love about you, even though your current comments make you look like a brick building falling down (pirindinga) or a house burning (girgen29).

_pirindinga_ Ahw! You always know how to make me feel like a sleek black object from 2001 (robertruelhman). Actually, don’t we look like kids (martyclane) with the trunk full of the stuff I left in my parents’ garage (k3llissima)?

_girgen29_ Actually, we look like bratty kids at mcdonalds (rebeccateg).

_pirindinga_ I defer. Even though I wish our Yugo looked like the batmobile (pirindinga), we look mega cool.

_girgen29_ Sebastian, love. I am sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but this Yugo looks a green tailed horny toad with gas (kat6128). Actually, in an even further retrospection, I preferred the tricycle you used to ride before since at least it looked like a bike. (martyclane)

_pirindinga_ Wow. Do I look like a professor with a virtual egg timer (munozmatt) who looks like a dog running through a field (girgen29) who looks like legs (martyclane)

_girgen29_ Honey, the important thing is that you do not look like an old car pimped to look new (michewkf) or like surfers in the desert (samyulaim).

_pirindinga_ I know. I look like hell on wheels (kat6128)… like a pair of mustangs (robertruehlman) gliding down Hollywood Blvd.

_girgen29_ That’s the spirit!

_pirindinga_ Ok, so going back to the eating situation. How about that place?

_girgen29_ I’m sorry, but it looks like the inside could use a censorship bar on a racy pin-up girl (k3llissima) Well, what if we look for a place that looked like an eagle (pirindinga) or a farm? (martyclane)

_pirindinga_ While we are at it, why not look for one that resembles a hole in the middle of a field of corn (requiredwhen)?

_girgen29_ SHHHH! This looks like the last line of a bob dylan song (kat6128).

_pirindinga_ Duh! We have been listening to the whole song…

_girgen29_ SHIT!! OUCH!!! Sebastian!!! You hell driver!!! What was that?

_pirindinga_ It looked llike a scooter riding through traffic (girgen29) It was switching from lane to lane as it if were like swimming (martyclane) to prevent the look of a flaming bible on easter (kat6128) You know what honey, what if my car looked like the new bronco’s logo (pirindinga)? I bet no scooter would get in the way.

_girgen29_Talking about logos, did you see the change I did to the computer that now makes it like it has the coolest desktop wallpaper of your favorite 80s band ever (munozmatt).

_pirindinga_ What does a logo and a wallpaper have in common? That’s if I were to tell you that this blvd. looks like a dozen of moon (rebeccateg) or like a crystal ball (robertruehlman).

_girgen29_ You know what you look like right now? Like a shovel in the snow (requiredwhen).

_pirindinga_ We are just like misunderstood siblings (samyulaim)

_girgen29_ JAJAJAJA Indeed. Ok, you know what, just choose a place to eat. I cannot take it anymore, I am about to jump into the river and look like a swimming polar bear (k3llissima) in search of fish!

_pirindinga_ I’m trying! But this restaurant looks like rubbermade (requiredwhen), this one like stones (samyulaim), this one like a time machine (robertruehlman) and I don’t mean it in a good way and that one like the back of my hand after the fire (kat6128).

_girgen29_ Well, pizza?

_pirindinga_ Pizza it is.