Presence VS. The Internet consists of video performances that are streamed as live 'episodes' online. The series explores the nature of identity, empathy, and desire within virtual and physical selfhood. The setup of each show positions itself at the intersection of live presence and Internet presence, and seeks to both discuss and embody that intersection itself.

Each episode answers to the following question in a different way, and from a different live location: What is the future of my relationship to myself? The series appropriates motifs of social technology at the same time that it remixes them, much like the project of self-representation online, and tries to discover what the future that project will be.

EPISODE LIST

Pilot Episode:
The Dialectic

Episode 2:
Self-sorting + The Fallacy of Adaptation

Episode 3:
Overly-Suspended Disbelief

Episode 4:
Pros + Cons of the "Imagined Audience"

Episode 5:
Pervasive Dissociativity + The New Hypnotizability

Episode 6:
Convergence and Existence

Presence VS. The Internet shamelessly exploits and explores notions such as fabricated identities and falsified expertise. The show adopts a purposefully broad and abstrct rhetoric, allowing the presenter in the videos to address those notions, as well other unwieldy ideas such as the accessibility of digital information and community-generated knowledge.

Some Questions:

1. When an online identity is created, is the purpose singular or always duplicitous?

2. Can this proejct 'discover something' about the relationship between physical domains and virtual realities using expressivity, abstraction, and metaphor?

3. Is either 'present' or 'virtual' identity easier to manipulate than the other, or is the tendency to manipulate one's identity a core trait possessed by some individuals and not others?

4. How does technology promote, expand, compound, or complicate our ability visualize our social roles? Is there a new, or separate social construction of reality where online identities meet?

5. How is 'performance' integral to an online identity? When is it distinct?

An episode may take place in the form of a lecture, demonstration, tutorial, litany, interactive lesson, etc. Scripts are crafted beforehand and available in print. Each performance attempts to cater to a live (present) and virtual (remote) audience at once.
// mp@marisaplumb.com //