While I do think the form of my project needs to be somewhat mutable until I see what kinds of output my model produces, I am starting to think more about the specific modes and forms of expression it might take.
I am hoping to embody my digital identity in some sense, to make it visible/accessible to my audience as an entity in its own right. That entity should be able to speak to, overwrite, and interweave with my sense of identity more broadly in a kind of palimpsest. In light of this, a material object seems useful, if not necessary, to give this project form and offer new perspective on these data assemblages that we currently access as a highly abstract–and, to the average person, technologically inaccessible–digital construct.
Can I use my source documents–essay drafts, journal pages, bits of handwritten text–to layer, form, and/or inform the presentation of the model’s outputs? Some potential approaches:
- Collage. Like Lynda Barry in What It Is, I could collage the model’s source texts–in some senses its “memories” or “experiences”–into a multimodal exploration of its creativity.
- Book sculpture?
- Literal layering and/or weaving of texts
