#1 Reflection

My first blog post will reflect on my choice for the form of this reflection – a profile on an imitation MySpace created by a German teenager named An. I was a tween when MySpace came about, and I promptly made a profile. Designing that profile was like designing myself – its appearance would be a sign to everyone that I, Emily, am quite obviously a cool girl in “real” life, based on the glittering butterflies I am able to conjure raining over my profile picture. Such design required a lot of copy and pasting blocks of code, and troubleshooting when this code did not manifest seamlessly. Later, like many others, I defected to Facebook. But my first social media profile was on MySpace, and I feel similarly to Dandi Meng, writing about Trisha Low’s Tumblr artwork – “it is not simply that our memories have come to include digital ephemera like screenshots, but that the structure of that ephemera has become the structure of memory itself — Tumblr and its visual logics turned into a form of consciousness.  I’m not sure I can describe what this consciousness is exactly, but I think I’m still in it”.[1] I find the visual logic of An’s imitation MySpace allows me to easily externalize my thoughts regarding this play, probably because long ago I internalized its visual logic. The first days of starting the profile I was thrilled by my ability to create a visual counterpart to the workings of my mind. I realized the ideas that shaped this play were formed for me not unlike a comment section – quotes from far-ranging thinkers and writers who I only imagine are replying to each other, brought together by my profile. Ultimately MySpace is where I learned a certain way of externalizing memory. But it feels like there is a cost to this form and this “saving”. Beckett was certainly interested in how technology interacts with memory, and Néill O’Dwyer writes about this element of Krapp’s Last Tape, describing the play as “a foregrounding of how technology – by furnishing the discretization, logging, archiving, and playback of Krapp’s life – affects the human subject, reorganizing him mentally and physically, by re-imposing exosomatic memories upon him”.[2] The SpaceHey account’s memory induces ambivalent feelings of safety and imprisonment – the profile promises that this can all be preserved and defined in a place that appears safer than the dying matter of my brain, but it also means that definition has now become discretized, logged, archived, and can be played back, not to mention whatever invisible forces are making note of my presence here to sell me a Beckett x Ann Quin x @2girls1bottl3 sweatshirt. For the play, I was interested in somehow staging the form of memory the online world imposes, as the memory of a recording device is staged in Krapp’s Last Tape. I attempted to do so through the character of the Voice, who seems to hear and preserve what the characters say and impose it back upon them. I will discuss this character a bit more later. Wendy Chun thinks of the memory of the computer not as “storage”, our common metaphor for it; instead, she sees it more like “erasable writing; but if a penciled word can be erased because graphite is soft, a computer’s memory can be rewritten because its surface constantly fades”.[3] This was of course the thought behind Jan’s soul being written in pencil and Bertha’s distaste for ink. There is something promising to these women about online memory’s lack of materiality, but they also have very little control over the erasing. To speak online is to hand over what is spoken to systems of computational control, while these systems become the structure of your own consciousness.

I find this SpaceHey form useful as a place for reflection on the creation of a play that deals with the extremely online not just because it is online, but also because it’s made with a certain early 2000s online nostalgia. As discussed in my essay, this is currently a major element of the extremely online aesthetic (thus why An, at the age of 18, having never had a MySpace, decided to recreate it). The nostalgia is, like in the case of An, and as we have seen with @2girls1bottl3, not necessarily related to having actually experienced the early 2000s, but an interest in an internet that now seems clunky, a place of poor simulation and limited capability. This nostalgia certainly engenders in me a false sense of control or a feeling of refuge from the overstimulating contemporary internet. Old MySpace feels refreshingly incapable and quaint. It recalls a time when the internet was more comprehensible – when I was a part of the coding language that brought my profile to “life”. But its general simplicity relative to today’s social media forms also allows more clarity and reflection on the origins of the logic of the extremely online, a place where many first encountered the idea of aestheticizing and advertising yourself in cyberspace, listing your likes and dislikes that shape your “identity bricolage”, unaware that this impulse could be used as data to define who you are in an all-out marketplace.[4] Neill O’Dwyer talks about the two forms of temporality present in Krapp’s Last Tape, because of the different temporalities of the recorder and the theatre.[5] While there is no internet on stage, I was hoping with my play to find a way to press the temporality of online space against the temporality of the stage. I feel heavy with the awareness that there is much I don’t know about the mechanics of the internet, from electricity to what I am “interacting” with online. But I tried to make the anxiety of this awareness a part of the characters themselves, that they don’t really know how this deeply complex and mostly invisible system functions around and in them.

So yes, on to the play itself – I hoped to write a play that would stage the aesthetics, forms, and processes of the online world, using both the extremely online and Beckett’s techno-philosophical and “memetic” dramaturgical practice as a guide. I had in mind Julia Jarcho’s conception that in Waiting for Godot, Beckett is forcing a “terrible intensification” of the laws of drama, taking the form to its most totalizing place in a way that paradoxically disrupts its totalizing power.[6] This feels closely related to the idea of “exhausting” a media as I discussed in my essay with Armin Schäfer, who describes Beckett stripping a medium, or a “means to make something visible” down to its most basic form.[7] The extremely online is an intensification of the online form, a sharpening of its laws and logic. Bringing this form on stage, to the realm of touching grass, I wanted to bring the extremely online logic to its most exact meaning – that to be extremely online means you literally no longer have a referent in the actual world. You no longer have a physical body. You are now indeed entirely online, existing at the binary pole of touching grass. And so when Jan is “gone”, or extremely online, her body is gone. In this play, the characters believe that the only way to prevent becoming extremely online is to connect themselves as much as possible with the “authentic” material world, or to touch grass. Of course, “touching grass” ultimately fails to save them from becoming in many senses “online”, because the concept of touching grass is only a function of the logic that the online world and the actual world are separate places. The impenetrable border between the online and the offline no longer exists. Online is a part of your living room, or your store of sensorily engaging books for adults. I don’t mean to say that I think there is no ontological difference between the virtual world and the actual world – but that what is online “migrate(s) across different supports”, in the words of Hito Steyerl, whose evocative descriptions of online coming “unplugged and unhinged” and “crowding offscreen space” were a big inspiration in conceptualizing how I could conceive of staging online’s forms.[8]

I also want to reflect a bit on the extremely online as the perceived trash of contemporary culture, something not to be taken seriously or put under consideration. I am not an extremely online person in that I do not have social media profiles in my real life that I post on. I do not participate in the churn. But online, I often feel like an explorer in a very important place. When I see flavored water TikTok, a tennis skort with the first lines of The Bell Jar printed in Arial font, or @2girls1bottl3, when I come across something that has the thrust of “gestalt from nowhere” or “nowhere” I have been, my inclination is to take it very seriously because it induces a serious feeling.[9] I could describe it as the serious feeling that something is grazing the void. I think the humor that is often present online is certainly a part of that, I don’t mean to imply that it isn’t funny, or silly. But like in Beckett’s work, the comedy is a part of the tragedy. I also don’t mean to imply that Beckett’s work and @2girls1bottl3 are of commensurate complexity. I think my perception of the mechanics of Beckett’s dramaturgy clarifies something about the mechanics of this extremely online TikTok account. And I hope that the remediation of these mechanics on stage will yield more clarifications.

Lastly, to consider why I am writing a play specifically – I have come across performance artists who perform elements of the extremely online in actual space and with physical objects, such as Molly Soda, Sara Cwynar, and Trisha Low (all of their work is featured on my profile), but it's not something I have come across in the space of theatre. Caryl Churchill's Love and Information definitely looks at the form of the internet, but it doesn't seem specific to me to the form of the extremely online. As I touched on in my essay, I'm interested in placing these forms in a "play", perhaps for reasons related to why Beckett was interested in the proscenium. I'm interested in the theatre as a form that previously held strong powers of illusion and subjectification but has since lost those powers in the face of mass media, and I'm interested to see how that interacts with the extremely online.