dvd video – Aspect/Microcinema – ISBN 097496574X
If ‘identity’ is one of the most important topics concerning the digital possibilities of reality construction, ‘personality’ is a more general aspect of the core personal traits that let us still recognize an (almost) ‘human’ (opposed to a ‘machine’). In this issue of the valuable Aspect dvd magazine, works focused on artificially constructed or artistically abstracted personalities are included and commented, as usual, by some interested critics. Singular human entities are effectively constructed (or duplicated) upon social conventions, gestures, dresses, expressions, assumed roles and identity crisis. The daily mediated experience made us used to perceive a vast range of entities to naturally interact with. But destructuring pieces of identity and constructing credible personalities is a different process than configuring an attracting avatar. Nevertheless the avatar form is a recognized liquid second skin, that embodies some of the instinctual traits of the owner. And both these methods of representing an apparently independent entity constitute nothing more than an appropriate meaningful conglomerate of data, that can as well represents a completely artificial entity in a crowded mediascape. So the question could be: will persons be recognized as ‘human’ because of their ability to manage themselves as an information node? In this collection there’s a wide investigation, ranging from the seminal work ‘Roberta’ by Lynn Hershmann made in early seventies, to the Kristin Lucas’ ‘Involuntary Reception’, the Jill Magid’s ‘Evidence Locker’ and The Yes Men‘s ‘WTO’, building a seminal selection that represent these topics for future references.