The Noise of Becoming

Abstract

This visual essay aims to review a virtual art installation: the cyberformance of NAUT-ADA (2018-2020): a fictional character on Instagram that uses role-playing as the method to provoke the affinity between identity and embodied spectatorship: the overflowing reproductive fragmentation of the self within the hypertextual filter bubble (Instagram), and the irresistible affirmation and validation from others that perpetuate self-abjection. I will use a diffractive analysis along with NAUT-ADA’s visual spectacle to attest to the presence of heterotopia: ‘a spatial otherness’ (Foucault, 1986) in virtual environments. The Instagram character NAUT-ADA underlines a retroactive process of becoming ‘as both matrix and catalyst’ (Ascott, 1966): an intelligent virtual art object acting as a metaphor to perform the embodied spectatorship. The title ‘Noise of Becoming’ is to identify the embodied spectatorship as a primary trigger for self-abjection, which actively discharges an excess of self-censorship as a direct result from the “Instagrammable” affirmation-seeking behaviors and the lattices of virtual affiliation inside of the echo chamber. I will further discuss how to embody the diffractive process in my practice to interrupt the reproduction of the same narrative elsewhere.