Ah! Well, he was inspired by what he saw and was going to do a monograph of three people online but as he kept digging he realized he had more than enough material just doing on this “Kenneth Udut” guy.

Ah! Well, he was inspired by what he saw and was going to do a monograph of three people online but as he kept digging he realized he had more than enough material just doing on this “Kenneth Udut” guy.

Well, here, part of his introductory letter:

“Hi Kenneth,

I’m a student at IUAV University in Venice on my bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication. I randomly met your works and content you posted online through Internet Archive. I was impressed by your unique way of presenting yourself and your interests through a variety of mediums and platforms, something I have never seen before.

Your use of the different platforms indicates an awareness of the medium and thus a somewhat critical approach to it, and I was interested in how your wide range of interests allowed me to understand traits of your personality over time.

I am in the process of preparing my final undergraduate paper, and my research has been geared towards analyzing how people over time have changed the way they store and protect their memories and experiences, because of changes in the online and offline tools dedicated to this purpose.

I am producing the first issue of a hypothetical publishing project that will consist of monographs of people discovered online.

The goal is not to analyze in a cold, scientific way the people involved but to give space in a physical object to people’s lives, creating a narrative from their online published content.”

SO back to my words:

So I suppose the question might be: Is it possible, using solely the published content of a person’s life, to accurately represent the traits of the person presenting the material in an authentic way?

So, he included for example, a recording of my voice I made in 1990 when I was 17/18 years old and I uploaded to PC-Link (an online service that came just before America Online). He found experiments I did in 3D modeling projecting my face onto a sphere and my reflections on how it felt to see myself in that way. Or a Minecraft video I made where I took my effigy and destroyed it and another where I ‘d managed to create web-browsers within Minecraft and showed my Minecraft avatar using my Twitter and Facebook accounts and making posts that would show up in the greater internet.

So I think he was presenting material that showed this internet persona reflecting on his own online image across time using the evolving New Media technologies, and how he compares it to his real world self – (something that can never fully make it online).

[I’ve archived many of my online postings such as comments, etc since 1989 to an ugly website, http://icopiedyou.com starting in 2014 – (the I and you being the same but also two different people) – and he also spent a lot of time gathering research from things he found there].

So, what made his work original?

It was his curation of this gigantic mess more than his presentation.

The conclusion of his Introductory email included his inspiration image with this caption:

Printing Out The Internet By Kenneth Goldsmith (A reference)

A perfect match. He made some sense of a collection of non-sequiturs.

[responsivevoice_button voice="US English Male"]

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


× six = 18

Leave a Reply