Manifesto

We created our Blog to pinpoint our ideas, using it as a virtual forum to develop our research. Primarily, we looked into the idea of creating fake identities on facebook as a means of performance, to collect friends and design the perfect concept of ‘cool’.

From here, our ideas advanced into a new ensemble piece utilising different medias, displaying alternate ways of presentation and the presentation of self. This spanned from an article found in popular women’s magazine ‘Glamour’. The said article explored the number of different ‘women inside your head’ following the text, a self discovery test allows you to find out how many voices you have. We both took the test, Victoria having less ‘voices’ than Chloe indicating that Chloe has several types of ‘women’ to help her cope with arising issues whereas Vikki has less, yet is more in control with hers, staging them all equally.
We decided to create a short multi-media film about Vikki’s’ everyday alter-egos, this was based on a number of social situations including, at home around the dinner table, intoxicated with peers, at work with customers, by ones’ self and in rehearsal. Using Vikki, we could display all those women inside of her igniting several alter egos that are shown in her everyday life.

We wanted our practical project to serve more or less as a documentary detailing sociological perspective from which social life and the performative-ness of it can be observed.
Our aim was to create a practical which was both theatrical but also virtual that encompasses real life of today and how we live in a nation that forces us to perform or else.

Baz Kershaw (1999) suggests that ‘Widespread changes in the processes of the social...are producing what I call the performative society. How individuals fare in the competition between life-styles or the struggle for survival depends increasingly on their ability to 'perform'. Hence late capitalist multi-party democracies produce societies in which performance pervades cultural process.’
The way in which we have created the real life is by forming a case study so we can look at to what extent the individual ‘Victoria’ in her ordinary working situation conducts herself and her interactions with others, the way in which she controls and or possibly manipulates the impression people form of her, the way that she ultimately reacts, responds and does so whilst sustaining this ‘performative’ interactive performance. The two questions of interest we establish were; the first being, does life still represent what is real or something that is well rehearsed? And the second being; is the individual presenting themselves in the form of a disguise, constantly playing a role, character, who society wants them to be or anything but who they are?

The reason we essentially wanted to make a multi-media video is because when researching into Philip Auslander and the subject of Liveness we realised that the status of live performance is slowly yet surely diminishing due to our culture being dominated by mass media. If the only way to reach our audience was through media and the use of screen that was to us therefore the most suitable method in which to conduct our practice.

It is totally natural that when an individual enters the presence of others they commonly seek to acquire information about him or her or to bring into play information about them already possessed. As Kenneth J. Gergen discusses, ‘In determining the self that we present, the environment in which the encounter takes place is as important as others’ identities. We are not likely to identify ourselves in the same way at a formal dance as we do in a pool hall, regardless of who is present’. In our online age- this extends to interactive social environments including instant messaging, facebooking, myspacing and office emails. In each circumstance every individual is guilty of presenting themselves in a different way. However, western culture generally condemns those whose public face differs from their private conception of self.

It is clear that when an individual plays a part he/she implicitly requests his/her audience to take seriously, the impression that is fostered before them. The observer is asked to believe that the character they see actually possess the attributes he/she appears to possess, for example, even though he is fictional, consider the alter egos of Clarke Kent and Superman, they are both the same person but with what seems like different characteristic and personality traits.

Our approach was based on the influence of theorist Sigmund Freud as he was the original observer of human conduct. The notion of psychoanalysis ‘being a system of intellectual constructions, becomes something that generally concern others, but not the reader himself.’
Freud brought to light that we scientifically develop an id (inner desire) as we are not born one which is responsible for our basic drives, like food, sex and our aggressive impulses. From there we then use our ego which meets the needs of the id and is primary based on the reality principle, followed by the super ego which tells us the rights and wrongs of a situation and is the morale part of us.

We wanted to form a multi-media performance piece that combined and introduced a range of interdisciplinary practices by using new media's to show how we live in a performative society that involves us displaying a multitude of alter ego and adapting personality traits in everyday life. By doing this we required the outcome of our project to show that (as the test we are going to make our audience do, will explain) we have many alter-egos and characteristics not just to survive in this ‘dog eat dog’ media driven culture but to merely embody these characteristics in order to cope with different circumstances and situations in life. Therefore one believes that we are neither performing nor frauding ourselves.