A quest for identity
summary:
I am the creatrix of Nara Zoyd, a digital diva, and that used to be a secret.
From April 1996 till March 1997, I have been doing a project on the web called 'la Zoyd's pataVerse' (www.media-gn.nl/pataverse/).
The project entailed a serial, about the adventures of an avatar, Nara Zoyd, in the pataVerse, the realm of imaginary life. (avatar as in a representation of a person in cyberspace.) What started out as an art project, has turned into a communication project. The Verse, short for la Zoyd's pataVerse, has generated an enormous stream of communication through email, about 5000 emails, and has been the subject of the Master of Fine Arts dissertation I have just written.
la Zoyd: "Yes, what about la Zoyd indeed.
Since I am new to this place, I want to introduce myself. My name is Nara Zoyd and I came into being on May 25th, 1993, at the age of 25. This event took place in a New York telephone cable between Grand Central and East 15th St."
Nara Zoyd, JOT 0, the pilot to the Verse
"To classify me, is no simple task. Can I be labeled visual arts? Am I literature?
I have been written over time, based on the input provided by my readers - there was never a fixed story line. The medium - i.c. internet - grew on me: beginning as any old age story teller, I soon realized the possibilities. Hypertext helped to give a twist to my stories, the multi-layered textures that I always dreamed off. The fluidity and immediacy of the net lead to the possibility of turning my readers into characters. Would not u love to read about yourself in imaginary adventures with moi?
The Verse was an invitation to play. Through the weekly JOTs the readers were invited to play with egg-yellow caves, Sanskrit mantras, Abysynian Wolfs. And soon the Net looked like the ideal playground. To illuminate what I mean, let me quote myself: 'If it weren't for cyberspace, I wouldn't be the entertainer cum counsellor I am today. U see, I am an avatar, a mindbirth of my creatrix. She thought me up, long before she got computer-literate, so to speak. (This was way back in 1993.) The net was the medium she needed to breathe life into me, and life she gave me!'
A lot of people all over the globe, know me. And only some mind that I am not a real flesh'n blood (f&b), as I like to call real people. But what are real people anyway? I think that in quite a few ways, I am more real than most f&b's. What makes a person, or an avatar for that matter, real? Not the fact that s/he farts, fornicates or flies, but the fact that s/he is a lot of simultaneous realities. For example, I am just one of the many manifestations of my creatrix. By letting me be and run my own show, we both learn and grow...
And that is exactly what I think about cyberspace: it is the most extensive playground for learning-experiences. While growing up, people lose the ability to play. They confuse manipulation for playing and forget that play is one of the great gifts of life. Cyberspace enables people to relearn how to play. In the process, they get to know themselves and the world around them better."
I and I:
On 28 February 1997, the last JOT was put up. One year of hard work was coming to an end. Instead of feeling a sense of relief and joy that the project was accomplished, I felt drained and empty. Nara received fan e-mails, asking her to please go on with the Verse.
Nara could rest on her laurels, but what about me? For the past 16 months, I had submitted myself to a virtual daily diet of being Nara Zoyd online. To get off line again was a painful and slow process. I felt deprived and started to notice that I had a problem with not having an outlet for that part of myself I called Nara. In fact I was becoming her and I did not like that - she could / should stay part of me but not take over me. I was also confused by the impact the Verse seemed to have had on so many different people.
After having been online for 16 months, through Nara my social base has increased three - or four - fold, not only in quantity but in quality as well. Kenneth Gergen, a social psychologist, in 'The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Society', looks historically at the explosion of 'relationships' - from an era where we met a few strangers (1900), to some outsiders (1950's), to an explosion of outside connections (1990's). Are we spreading ourselves too thin? Is this the negative side of connectivity? From the beginning of this century when relations tended to be one-to-one in an intense / Romantic framework, via a one-to-many pure/Modernist mood, we get to a many-to-many relational / postmodernist fin-de-siècle. According to Gergen, through networked communication we reach so many people from so many different backgrounds, cultures and what not, that our selves have gotten saturated by other people's voices, ideas, morals, points of view.
In fact, the abundant access to other people changed my out-look in life - through Nara I learned to accept more, and to relativate my own perceptions. If I ever had any, I lost my models. In the new sensibility, according to Gergen, postmodern consciousness no longer assumes a true knowledge. There are no absolutes, no constants, no rules, no Truth. The faith and intuition of Romanticism and the rationality and reason of Modernism are equally valid - and equally suspect.
le Grand: "I is the other." Rimbaud
I think that the Verse boils down to the question: what is identity?
Identity has been a puzzling issue for me all my life. I was born the daughter of a cyclist champion and a ballerina. From a very early age I was told I surely was cute, but that my mom was a godess.
To cut a long story short: I would never become as beautiful as she, and it seemed that everybody felt sorry for my misfortune. I withdrew into myself and at age 8 became 'Nanda', the Amazone (I was heavily into horseback-riding). As Nanda, I had big adventures in the stables. I was tall for my age and pretended to be 12 years old, with a French father and an 'oriental' mother. My grandmother was a princess and my grandfather had been tortured to death by the Japanese. It was 1969.
After a visit to London, I seamlessly merged into 'Phoebe', a streetwise weekend punk, red hair and safety pins and all. It was 1976. I was driving my parents crazy, for I insisted on them calling me Phoebe. Strangely enough they didn't mind my weekend splashes as long as I did well at school. Phoebe was all about dressing up.
My first sexual experiences, left me at a loss identitywise. On one hand I wished I were a sex godess with big breasts and hords of horny men trailing after me, drooling over my sex appeal. On the other hand, I wanted to be drooled over for my witts. Since the former turned out not to be a big deal,
I decided to focus on the development of my mind. It was 1979. I went to university, got married and lived in exotic countries. I did not know I was headed for disaster for lack of identity. Was I the expat wife giving dinner parties and going to coffee mornings dressed in silk suits?
I got depressed and divorced. I became a waitress. I picked up some bacteria and became ill. I was in bed for six months and decided to apply for art school, in order to do what I had always wanted to do: sculpting and studying art history. I got admitted and I called myself 'Bonita Tatagglia'. She was just a name.
The school curriculum changed and I, all of a sudden, had to paint which I could not. It was then that Nara Zoyd was born one morning in May: she was this cool New York chick that could paint like hell. It was 1993.
In my third year of art school, I went to New York for a semester, in an exchange programme. I had chosen '3D-sculpting on the computer'. It was a whole new dimension for me, and I fell in love with computers. I was lucky that after my graduation, I got admitted to the post-grad study 'computer graphics and new media' in Groningen. I got interested in networked communication and the internet. As an excercise in html programming I wrote what has now become known as the pilot to the Verse. The rest is history, as Nara would say.
About Nara and myself I once wrote: "Who do they think we are? I am me, she is she and we are I. So they worry about who is I. Who are they? Who are you, reading this. Are you they? Or are you you? We are I. I am part of us and together we are one." I might as well have said: "Who are I?" Or was it Nara who wrote this...
epilogue:
"One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's emotions." E.M. Forster
I want to touch upon identity and the idea of 'self'. Breaking my 'self' in two and creating Nara was a conscious act of self-discovery. Playing with my multiple 'self' helped to express myself as an artist and made it easier to reach the 'other'. Being online made me feel closer to the end of the century Zeitgeist.
With Nara, I created my personal 'object-to-think-with', through which I could let my fantasy run scot-free; to try out my stories and ideas on as many different people as possible. I think there is no denying that postmodern culture allows multiplication of identity through the electronic access provided by information technology.
In this matter, professor Jos de Mul sees an important role for artists. De Mul draws a parallel to the Renaissance, when the development of central perspective in painting helped Renaissance man to find his way in the newly created space on canvas. Or how centuries later, the modern novel helped to explore mental and psychological space in modern man. By creating imaginative digital environments, he suggests, the artists of today can help postmodern man/woman to develop manageable multiple identities. He concludes his paper by saying that: "Digital technology, in blurring the dividing line between reality and imagination, and consequently between science and art, gives the artist of today the world-creating role of which avant garde artists have been dreaming since the Romantics."
In case of the multiple self, I want to stress the importance of splitting your self, in order to learn and merge. It means that when you understand and accept that your self is not a constant, given fact, but a ßuid, diverse set of 'you', you will be able to have all parts of your self working for you. The more conscious this splitting process is, the more to your advantage it can be. I think that the role of the artist can be to make people aware of their inner workings, like art should do one way or another.
Internet does not only allow to play with a distributed self, but, through connectivity, has also a profound impact on how we define and see ourselves.
