Whew, I finally made it. After 15 tedious years I am about to cross the finish line in a big way. Please help me celebrate this at the Artist Reception, tomorrow night, from 4:00 – 7:00 pm at the Emmanuel Gallery located on the Auraria Campus. Following there will be a totally awesome pizza party at my crib, yo! So come on down and cheggity-check it.

Update: There has been a request to move the pizza party to Friday night, to allow for the ability to go out later (if so desired). I am FOR this. All opposed? Sounds good. Pizza Party Friday night then. WOOT. 

I am interested in the exploration of interaction with technology to aid in achieving catharsis. By leveraging the ubiquitous mobile phone each of us carry in our pockets, by exploiting the growing phenomena of text messaging, and by utilizing the language of advertising, I hope to encourage the viewer to complete the interactive process presented to them. I am interested in the inevitable collision of public and private spaces, and the dialog that results from broadcasting our private, internal thoughts in a very public setting.

The end result is a customizable, interactive experiment exploring the use of emergent mobile technology to instigate dialog, and create a hybrid space for reactive public performance – a mobile method for catharsis by proxy.

“Huh.”

(quiet for a moment)

“Ain’t this bout cell phones?”

So as of late I’ve been thinking about what to title the actual piece. I’m currently working with the idea of catharsis by proxy. Basically the fact that by watching and emphathising with another’s pathos, we can be moved as individuals. Hollywood and the entertainment industry thrive from this.

In doing research in contemporary art history, one is inevetiably confronted with the works of Jacques Derrida and his influence in the structural and post-structuralist work, as well as art and literary criticism. One idea I kept running into was Textuality.

From Wikipedia:

Textuality is a concept in linguistics and literary theory that refers to the attributes that distinguish the text (a technical term indicating any communicative content under analysis) as an object of study in those fields.

More over:

The word “text” arose within structuralism as a replacement for the older idea in literary criticism of the “work,” which is always complete and deliberately authored. A text must necessarily be thought of as incomplete, indeed as missing something crucial that provides the mechanics of understanding. The text is always partially hidden; one word for the hidden part in literary theory is the “subtext.”

Hummm. Now how do we apply focus to this subtext? How can we study the study of subtext?

Again from Wikipedia:

In epistemology, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata is data about data (who has produced it, when, what format the data are in and so on).

Therefore I propose as my new thesis title, Meta-Textuality: Catharsis via Proxy.

Ooh, sounds intimidating.