#sonicselfies

 In April 2018, I was invited to present for the Selfie Subjectives Symposium, a collaborative project between Creative Agency, Swinburne University of Technology’s Social Media Research Group, the RMIT Design & Creative Practice ECP Platform, and Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC). In preparation for my presentation entitled “Mobile Selfie Art, Digital Wayfaring and Mobile Art Ethnography” I gave an overview of some of the historical connections of art, self-representation, and the selfie as a digital ethnographic object of research. This ignited an interest in the multisensorial digital sculpting of the selfie as motif, and how one might hear a collective and more social sonic selfie, one that is multisensorial in approach. Around May 2018 I continued to think about the everyday experience of the mediated self in and around the home, via the mobile phone. I began to question what a sonic selfie might be.

Live. Social. Mobile. Heard.

I continued to question the importance of listening and voice within the collective selfie co-construct. In 2020, I presented a creative experiment with collaborator DJShanitaVICE.

This iteration was called From AoIR to Air: A collective Sonic Selfie Experience. It captured a live performance poem that occurred at the closing social event for the AoIR2020: Life(online) international conference (Association of Internet Research). This was the first time AoIR existed online only, due to Covid-19 travel restrictions. The performance work was co-hosted by myself and DJShanitaVICE via Zoom. At the tail end of this 70s/80s electro dance hour, I performed a reflective spoken word listening experiment with event participants across three different time zones. This socially networked performance of a collective voice echoes the Fluxus art movement, speaks to transient nature of digital connection, and embraces the process of folding back into the feminist glitch via the Zoomiverse. The next iteration will be performed in various guises over the next few years.