Amy Lawless & Chris Cheney: I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected
A collaborative, hybrid composition: part essay, part poem, and part social media collage. The authors cannibalise traditional research methods, for a more personalized, technology based process. While meditating upon Kurt Schwitter’s notion that “the medium is as unimportant as I am myself,” they confront historical traumas through the body of real and virtual environments. Establishing online personas on Myspace, Yelp and Twitter, they explore the real feelings that attach themselves to these expressions of self, the real sense of desire, connection, affirmation and friendship, as well as possibilities of destruction and loss. The relationship to the mother, a candlepin bowling league and an online Korean roleplaying group are the social environs through which the authors are made to grapple with their own sense of isolation and otherness in the digital age, the blind energy of desire, and the strangeness of tears.Â