Digital Stories

An exploration into the ways we talk about the lives that we live on the web. This exploration spans multiple mediums, with both digital and physical results.

About the Project

How do we talk about our digital lives? Digital Stories questions the concept of people having separate digital and physical lives. It is a critique of the notion that digital friendships mean less than physical ones.

I grew up on the internet. From Neopets, to design forums, to IRC chatrooms—the internet has been a massive part of my life for as long as I remember. Now that I’m getting older, I’ve started to realize that my digital life and my physical life are so intertwined that I cannot separate the two.

This project contains a lot of different experiments that deal with form and interaction in different ways. All the pieces are very personal in nature and all deal with my own personal story of the internet.

A panoramic shot of the exhibition space. You can see all of the projects mentioned below scattered around the room, while I appear on a Skype call to the large screen at the front. Various pieces of things that I've collected over the years from my online friends also appear on the walls.

This was a solo project that I completed for my thesis at the Rhode Island School of Design. I designed, constructed, and installed all pieces of this project, which cumulated in an interactive exhibition and presentation in 2017.



Presentation

The cumulation of the the project was a presentation that showed off all of the different pieces. The presentation was set in a dark room, only illuminated by screens. For the speech part of the presentation, I skyped into the room, which was displayed on a screen at the very front. Instead of talking out loud, all communication was made via a chatroom on the project website.

The project website was where people viewed the presentation and communicated throughout. Any comments or questions you might have are welcome in the chat on the website.




Digital Stories

A book with essays that explore my personal journey. You can view the full book here. The book is split into four parts:

001: Feel

The stories that I want to tell about my digital identities and the digital life that I lived online

002: Talk

An annotated selection of talks with various people I know or knew online

003: Work

A selection of work from this series that discuss my digital identity and digital history

004: Archive

An archive of digital ephemera




A Love Letter to the Internet

A video performance that links to mass texts sent out to the audience. The video is a love letter to the internet, where the internet is treated as the collection of all my online friends. These friends appear throughout the video as Throughout the video, and even after the video ends, audience members will receive text messages with images or messages pulled from my personal archive of digital ephemera.





Chatlogs

This work is a physical collection of chat logs, focused around my younger self. While often ephemeral, these chat logs have been given physical form, and once committed to paper are much harder to forget or put away. It can be found at a later date by anyone, regardless of permission.

There were 5 copies of this text made—all but one were placed in bookstores and libraries, among books about history, sociology, anthropology, and plays as a manifestation of digital culture in these physical spaces.




Birthdays

A selection of digital ephemera—long forgotten files found on old harddrives, old email accounts, abandoned social media profiles—all related to my personal journey of exploring my self identity.

My search for my identity as a transgender man is impossible to separate from the internet. Growing up in a socially conservative society, the internet was my safe haven and my confidant. This is my attempt at archiving the best and the worst moments of my journey by presenting my own digital history.

The user is given the ability to sort through the information at their own pace and make their own connections between the different pieces of content. They could also take a copy of the project away with them via the thumbdrives.