This Isn’t Even My Final Form

Abstract

You Are Amid Waves …but lurching towards a coast finally. These are not like where you have been, where the water swells and sinks without clear motive. You are pulled, almost gravitationally, towards a solidity you can barely remember. You know that the human body is, like, 65 percent water, and now you are terrified of reaching shore. You imagine your body as a dried-up husk; your soul has been squeezed out like toothpaste and lies there next to you. You scream three words. They are: ‘I feel fine.’ The previous is an excerpt of the narration from a large projected video piece within my thesis exhibition, This Isn’t Even My Final Form. This section of the video is paired with appropriated footage of a sunset on the Pacific Ocean with waves lapping up on shore. The narration is a poetic and metaphorical interpretation of various aspects of French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s idea of becoming and how it is expressed within humans in a contemporary world that is highly integrated with digital technologies. Deleuze plays a big part in my philosophical worldview, and thus similarly in my art practice and in this paper. Though he died before the mass integration of the Internet, his work represents for me the most lucid understanding of the effects of net culture on contemporary human life. I will discuss my usage of his concept of the rhizome, a concept which describes the basic structure of peer-to-peer networks, of the actual and virtual, and again, here, of “becoming.”