Aesthetics of the Everyday: A Walk Along the Shoreline of Youth Identity

• In Event: Textures of Social Media Exchange: Youth Identity and Digital Aesthetics in a Global Learning Environment

Abstract

The turn in education towards a sociocultural model for conceptualizing meaning-making practices has resulted in extensive research on identity as it relates to processes of reading and writing the world. The dawning of the digital has complicated these investigations as literacy practices migrate beyond the textual into the visual, and the landscape for cultural participation both collapses into the vapidity of a parasitic commodity economy while paradoxically spiraling outward across an amorphous spatial terrain. The consequences of these developments require that identity be reimagined as an ongoing aesthetic project whose forms acquire meaning through relational conditions. Specifically, I ask how does aesthetic engagement in the production and distribution of digital artifacts reveal the performative nature of youth identity and how does this aestheticized identity unravel ethical positions through artistic elaboration.

This study proposes a framework for exploring the aestheticization of identity by drawing on studies in visual culture (Mirzoeff, 1999) that consider how technologies of visualization have reshaped our everyday, resituating our ethical and political participation. This everyday acquires its defining features through the proliferation of commodities across spheres of cultural activity-where culture itself circulates as commodity-facilitating the overt aestheticization of the everyday by way of pervasive advertising and the conversion of all objects into subjects of artistic appropriation (Baudrillard, 1990). Combined with the consumptive-productive capacities of digitalization (Beers, 2009), identity is a projection of the ephemeral assemblage of cultural materials whose character reflects the relational texture of its aesthetic formulation.

To answer this question, I employed a mixed-methodological approach to analyze four interrelated data strands. 1) Online activity was analyzed to reveal how students contextualize their shared works. 2) Observational field-notes were used in analysis of offline processes of design and reflection. 3) Art methodologies and semiotic analysis were incorporated in the treatment of student artifacts. 4) Interviews were conducted for insight into how students perceive their own lives relative to these works.

Data were collected over the course of two years at an after-school visual arts program in a New York high school with 12 student participants. Data points included a series of video exchanges between New York students and online peers in India. Videos were shared on the network, discussed in classroom viewing sessions, and supplemented by text-based activities such as blogs and messages that offered explanations of intended meanings of the works. Analysis revealed that through this artistic collaboration, students imagined their own lives in aesthetic terms, critically navigating an abundance of mediatized stereotypes and cultural tropes, thus supporting the claim that an aestheticized identity refracts against its own social position amidst the unfolding of artistic events. Analysis also revealed students engaged in complex literacy practices (both textually and visually) and that the aesthetics of these works conveyed nuanced ethical positions, supporting the claim that the aesthetics of new media is produced through the relational conditions that inspire its design. Implications of this study include pedagogies for aesthetic integration in the classroom and support for fresh methodologies for considering the research of aesthetic practices.

Author

• John Michael Scott, University of California - Berkeley