Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

NUDE is an ongoing experimental online performance work that utilizes an Instagram account created for the artist’s laptop as a platform for exploring the intimacies and significances of the laptop apparatus in our technologically mediated society. Through automated screen recordings posted to the account “fideliasmacbookpro2,” this experimental performance posits the idea that our technological devices are more intimate representations of us than are our actual physical bodies. Instagram is used as a performance space to question the very anxieties of vulnerability, information security, production, and authenticity that the platform exemplifies. I draw on theorists as disparate as Brian Rotman, Rosi Braidotti, Diana Taylor, and Jonathan Crary to focus on the work as it both enacts and interrogates the self-surveilling practices of new media and online social media networks, the intimate relationships we have with our technological devices as they both empower and control us, the anxieties of work, production, and presentation, and the shifting notions of memory, knowledge, and knowledge production.