Digital Landscapes: Collective Psyche

by jenna beardsley

The digital age is unlike any other time space reality we have previously inhabited. Humanity has grown up and evolved with mass amounts of minute documentation; every detail remains. How do we make sense of all of this information? What holds genuine value and meaning in our collective minds?

I am working in the realm of archiving - snapshots in time coalesce into a larger picture of the moment. Past, present, and future are constantly colliding in the digital realm; I am interested in the convergence. In the same way, the past, present, and future are documented in our physical structures. The body lives as an archiving machine in the same sense that the devices we create do.

The internet is a paradox of freedom and limitation; how do we capitalize on its utopic nature while maintaining resistance to its censorship? Through the use of screenshots, video art, sound design, live performance, and text, I explore the physical body in tandem with the virtual body as a vehicle to accessing collective consciousness and collective memory. Joy and community, tools in resistance to the spiritual, physiological, and psychological warfare of the modern age, are built via combined memory archiving and processing. This webpage lives as a documentation of feeling-states. A live performance element lives as an exploration of embodiment. Together they create the past, present, and future.