WEEK 5

Jennifer Gonzalez- The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice

"On the one hand, there is a recurring desire to see online digital spaces as sites of universal subjectivity that can escape the limitations of race… On the other hand, a proliferation of racially marked avatars and experimental hybrids (human and nonhuman) increasingly populate artificial worlds and online chat spaces."

It is believed that anyone can be anything they want to be online, in chat rooms, game forums, emails, social media.  Yet it still all revolves around a name or a face. If it is not directly an image of a human being it is still a classification system. "Community beyond identity," this means that people still group with people they identify with, it just happens to be not about race, or is it. There are many communities online, some about hate, and some about community. Regardless, the internet world can be just as vicious as the real world.  Hansen is mentioned quite a bit in this writing.  "Hansen equates online self-invention, blackface, and racial passing as forms of 'imitation of an imitation; a purely disembodied simulacrum.'" It is all of our desires "to pass" judgement by anyone, that is why the need for different identities is present on the internet.  Although "the invisibility of 'real' bodies cannot, alone, produce a racially neutral space or even racially neutral subjects." It is impossible to get away from the way humanity itself works, unfortunately. We all wish that people could live happy, free of judgement, and together in peace.  Humanity as a whole, is incapable of doing this in the real world, and on the internet. We can't escape who we are, it is impossible, even if we all try to.