UC San Diego

By the Sweat of My Browser is a video installation that muddles the definitive slashes often placed between fact/fiction, reality/simulation, rehearsed/improvised, truths/lies. Utilizing performance, props, paper mache, and the language of the internet, I explore this muddling and its material effects on the phenomenology of the human body.

This paper contextualizes the installation of work. In it, I discuss key frameworks of my art practice, what Nicole would call “the whys of my work,” through short monologue-style vignettes. These relate to communication and language, camp as a mode of survival, and existing as a teen in the year 2007 - when all media converged and the separation between the internet, TV, cinema, and user generated content collapsed.

This body of work was formed as an attempt to navigate having a human body, one that breathes and bleeds and cries and smells, while simultaneously living in the user space of the internet, which is fundamentally anti-body. Through its content and form, it addresses lives lived in constant mediation and the new phenomenologies that have emerged because of this. I discuss my process of making and researching in this paper. These directly mimic the content and form of the work. Or do the content and form mimic the process? Maybe they are an infinite loop, with no end and no beginning. That would be fitting.