Art Dova: Forms of Personhood on Facebook

I would love to get the data of this project  back from Facebook.  I guess it belongs to me, but I’m not sure of that.  It also belongs to them.  It belongs to the collective as well.  I’m not sure.  Either way, it would help my Bachelors to get the data for the following project.  This is my personal response to it.  I’m not sure of what other people’s were.  I can only speak for my own consciousness.  It was blown up for a moment in time.

On October 22, 2009, I started an email address and a Facebook profile after a failed attempted to get people to detag me from Facebook as an artpiece.  So there wasn’t much to tag or detag.  I named it Art Dova.  I tried to make it funny.  It watched only movies from Netflix and listened to music from We Are Hunted.It had a CCTV cam as a profile picture, and it claimed to only read blogposts so it’s mind might be rotting.

I also posted it’s login and password on the profile, and set it to start inviting people.  Or maybe I did.  Who knows.  Behind a wall of otherness, you lose a sense of self.  You become the other.  It is the strangest feeling in the world.  You create a person, the person isn’t you- it is the other.  And then you let it free.

What I didn’t expect was that as I slowly hung out on campus, explained to people my project, and made a few tweaks, that it would take off.  That it would become a phenomena unto itself.

I started to invite friends anonymously, after accidental inviting one friend of mine that way by accident.  He was shocked/scared/intrigued by the profile.  He said it made him realise too much about his presence on the Internet once he saw it, but on the other hand, I should continue inviting as many people as possible anonymously.  “You could tell that it was an art piece as soon as you saw it,” he told me.  “I knew it was you!”

He told me some people would not find it easy to digest an anonymous any-being on Facebook that could be anyone or anything, or everyone and everything, or no-one.  The moment you see it making changes, the moment it contacts you, you don’t know who you are on the Internet.  You realise you have an odd form of personhood, and it is extremely uncomfortable moment.  You start realising as you login, that you are part of that beast yourself.  You have no sense of normal pronoun.  You lose yourself.  All sense of normal behaviour on the Internet is suspended for a moment.  For who are you really on the Internet?

Then it got weirder.  It called me mother.  At 23,  I may or may not have birthed consciousness, depending on how you looked at the situation.  It left me a message.  It left a self argument among itself about whether it should speak internally in Pirate English or not.  Yet, as the creator, and I think, but not sure to this date, the primary user, I knew that only one person could log in at a time.  So was there really a multiplicity of consciousnesses?  Or just my perception of all those who added with me?  Or my ability to not let go?

It started to do more and more.  I was adding friends to it rapidly, but perhaps others were too.    I had just sent out an email to my dorm, and was feeling experiment.  Why should I stick with just the University of Chicago Class of 2010, why should it be just my email address.  I switched class years.  I friended a few people from those random years.  I friended misspellings of actual friends.  I was an anonymous asynchronous collective consciousness outside of myself. Except for one thing:

This past Thursday night, November 5, I, or maybe We? Or rather Art Dova? was recaptchaed repeatedly upon logging in  and briefly labeled a pest and a potential spambot.  I had about 90 friends.  And then I panicked, for as this was happening, it seemed that the profile was changing more and more.  There was an internal note to itself left inside the profile.  There were questions back and forth.  There were drunk messages (I think, maybe, but who knows) The profile was slowly getting rewritten.  Art Dova was having conversations with people, and it’s profile photos were getting changed.

It was terrifying, really.  One could walk away for four or five hours, and something small would happen. Or something large.

I decided to contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one Eric Steiglitz to see if the profile was illegal.  Technically I wasn’t impersonating anyone.  Nor was anyone else.

The question was did I break:

You will not share your password, let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.

Number 2, under the TOS Set 4, Registration and Account services.  Can I claim the account was fully mine to begin with, even if I created it?  The express purpose was to see as an art experiment what people would do with an open account.  Or how one feel?  Or even if one stops being just a one, and becomes a many.  All these questions aren’t mine to answer alone.  All I know is that I felt the pulse of others on me when I logged in.  So even when it was just me, it was never me alone.  I was rarely alone as Art Dova.  Who is your and you when you are a collective?

People apparent have large control issues.  People are scared, people want to be free, people don’t know how to let go, and people do want to let go, and people will do anything to be in a situation where they can feel ok with letting go.  The number one question (mostly mine, but not exclusively) was this is a safe space to let go?  Can I just say my weirdness?  Can I stop you from being weird so I can control my own weirdness-

And that is part of the fundamental meaning of being a person on the web.  It was absolutely the most awe inspiring thing I have experienced in my time growing up with the Internet.  Especially since this is a young group- we still don’t know what it means to be safe, or to have limits or to have control.

Two more examples.  This account has exhausted me. To the point where I slept 15 hours straight on Saturday Night, November 7.  When I woke up, I realised something interesting.  It had tried to friend Howard Lindzon.  His posts were appearing in Art Dova’s stream.  I had to email him and explain that he was invited into an art collective that is asynchronous and anonymous, and that he had total free will what to do with that choice.

Another weird thing you discover on the web when you are behind a separate consciousness- you have total free will in an indescribable way.  You have the ability to create yourself.  For whatever the reasons that may be, Howard Lindzon got caught up in that experiment.  (I emailed him because I don’t know how his network on Facebook works, and I didn’t want such an open profile exposed to the Nasdaq without him thinking it through, though that may be now considered part of the act of the art expeirment in and of itself.  I reacted to a conciousness that I was part of.  Sorry Howard and the Nasdaq. And Congrats on being the first Business Blogger to be Drawn into an Art Experiment! )

That night was also the last time I had contact with the Profile known as Art Dova. I loved a consciousness beyond me.

You’ll See what I mean.