Krystal Clear Linda Carroli
While inquiries into the practices and theories of self are ongoing, the most recent decades have experienced an unrelenting and intense project focused on the interrogation of identity. This project has been realised repeatedly in the arts as artists of all persuasions, in particular, voices of the ‘other’, sought to find spaces in which to articulate seemingly marginalised experiences and hybridised identities. Among those spaces of inquiry is cyberspace, the virtual environment which we have come to understand variously in the idiom of postmodernism, as non-linear, fragmented, multiple, fluid, ephemeral and dispersed. What better place than this to try, test and throw to the wind the fiction that the self is unitary and/or centred. Enter the work of Di Ball which crosses the tropes of performance, writing, comedy and visual art to converge in cyberspace, a stage on which the manifestations of her multiplied and decentred self are presented. Like Sandy Stone, Di “seeks to validate the ideal of multiple selves, genders and personae, and perceives cyberspace as the ‘way in’.” 3 That is, the practice of situated knowledge in relation to cyberspace introduces new meanings for and experiences of body, space and place, extending our repertoire of experience and of self. Stone states that “cyberspace is a space of subversion ... manifesting that which breaks free of location technologies which are intended to create singular identities.” 4 Di’s itinerary of personae each have ‘boundary stories’ to tell - how they came to be here - and roles to play in both virtual and real life. These personae include a country and western singer, a fortune teller, a match-maker and a feminist academic and on the most part utilise Di’s surname, Ball. They represent various of Di’s subjective and embodied experiences. In short, as Di claims, “all my work is about me and the things I’ve done.” 5 Given this, the personae are not merely masks, but rather biographic renderings emerged from a really ‘out there’ life. As such, this work does not seek to escape the body, but rather, as Stone argues, body and socialisation are necessarily brought into the realm of cyberspace. 6 Clearly, this work is not predicated on ‘I think, therefore I am’, a revelation of a universal subject, but rather on ‘becoming’ or partiality, perhaps even driven by that most irrepressible of pleasures, jouissance. Di evokes the autobiographic ‘I’, which Sidonie Smith claims is available to women for appropriating the position of the self-narrating subject. 7 In Di’s ongoing project, the question is not about ‘who I am’, but about ‘how many I’s I can be/come’. Autobiography of this type is a mode of ‘talking back’. 8 Di trained and worked as an architect and she tells of spending 12 years silently working with grids and draughting tools, and having designed one too many kitchens: “the shadow that this time casts is my consistent use of multiples and a grid and an irreverence to the patriarchal hierarchy.” 9 She tells of finding her voice by singing, after that protracted period of quiet, and the joy of that. She tells of performance and learning the skills of acting, playing roles which are not necessarily a ruse or subterfuge. She tells of street theatre and busking, the impetus which resulted in the creation of ‘characters’ drawn from ‘selves’ she knew intimately. And then the introduction of humour and parody that are not only necessary modes of Di’s work, but also unavoidable in any meeting with her, the raucous laughter and the comic story-telling. By evoking these myriad avatars, Di is asking whether it is possible
for anyone to really ‘know thyself’, despite the Apollonaire doctrine which
commands it, because the multiplied self is constantly in flux. Subsequently,
in the presentation of this cacophony of personae, Di deploys technologies
of self, gender and subjectivity. Through these practices by which individuals
fashion their identities, 10 she evokes a partial subject or self
which talks back in many voices, and laughs in the face of the universalising
discourses of self and subjectivity. As Smith argues:
In this work, krystalball.net Di focuses on her persona, fortune teller, Krystal Ball, bringing her to virtual reality as never before. Di aka Krystal has designs on your future via an online Horrorscope where the news is not necessarily good. Perhaps in this trip through the ‘House of Horrors’, you shouldn’t ask questions you don’t really want to know the answers to. Complete with tent, this dalliance on the astral plane, is like a side show, cross-my-palm-with-silver encounter. Step right up ladies and gentlemen. Step right up and have your future told by the all seeing mystic, Krystal Ball. Just gaze into that crystal ball and all will be revealed. Di is poking fun at those ‘new age’ preoccupations that some are taking very seriously at this fin de millennaire moment. In the search for spiritual well being and guidance, in a desperate bid to ‘know themselves’, uncertain selves can be heartened to know that the ‘inner you’ has a future and that your ‘soul mate’ is waiting for you in IRC. 12 According to Margaret Wertheim, cyberspace does fill that role in contemporary culture, as the out of this world repository for spiritual yearning. 13 She claims that cyberspace has become not just a space of the spirit, but a place for spirituality. The mysterious Krystal Ball just might have privileged access to the spirit or psychic world and virtual space just might comprise the space of the medium. Or perhaps she just knows how to make a buck out of it! According to Wertheim, the cosmology of the Middle Ages constructed space to suggest ‘beyond’ as the celestial space of the spiritual and the divine. This dualistic thinking was displaced by a Euclidean notion of space, as evidenced in ‘perspective paintings’ and consolidated by Newtonian physics. Subsequently, the western notion of space is ‘monistic’ and materially-based. Wertheim asserts, cyberspace provides an ‘other’ space, a splitting of singular and material space. It is not physical space but outside physical space. It is beyond and therefore a potential space for spiritual and psychological investment. For some it presents as a different reality, a new world in which we can explore manifestations of self. Accordingly, western culture has come full circle in its perception of space, returning to the split medieval spatial scheme, forcing an address of physical and non-physical spatial realities and providing a space of reflection or escape. In this respect, there is a kind of doubling in the work, as Di is not one of the believers: her project is one of corporeality and agency rather than transcendence. Once again, we return to the phantasm of the Middle Ages, in expectation of the millennium, decadent and occult, taking counsel from the carnivalesque and exotic muse. And who is this muse, indeterminate, veiled and secretive? It is a question of not only the subjective, but intersubjectivity in which Krystal’s desire is factored. As Slavoj Zizek argues, “the original question of desire is not directly ‘What do I want?’, but ‘What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?’” 14 In this interactive web-based work, interactions with Krystal are designed to reveal information or knowledge about us not her, and in the offering of this information, she performs the answers to the questions Zizek poses as constitutive of intersubjective desire. Krystal is not only asking you to make choices about the various ‘whos’ you are or want to be, but holding up a mirror, a multifaceted crystal, in which you can gaze at your reflection. While Di’s various personae might be her technologies of the self, our
engagements with things such as horoscopes and fortune tellers also play
a role in our own formations of identity, our search for clarity in a confusing
epoch. But ultimately, cyberspace is not that void into which we transcend,
but rather an extension of the murky and delightful stuff that comprises
our lives. In krystalball.net Di invites us to interrogate and enjoy the
slippage and pleasure that occurs in practices of complexity, to inquire
into what it means to know, enjoy and be yourself.
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