The Art of being novel: rethinking cartographies of personalisation

Abstract

In a global period whereby the “personal” is no longer associated with people but with affective technologies (Shirky 2008; Lasén 2004), the old feminist adage of the “personal as political” takes on new dimensions of meaning. Through the rise of social, networked media such as Web 2.0—characterised by Social Networking Systems (SNS like Facebook)—concurrent to the force of user created content (UCC), how we experience a sense of media, place, locality and globality is dramatically transforming. With the emergence of UCC “vernacular creativity” (Burgess) there is a need rethink intimacy, creativity, authorship and labour (social, creative, affective and emotional) in terms of how we imagine and practice art and new media. Drawing from my research into UCC in the Asia-Pacific, I will reconsider how emerging practices such as keitai shōsetsu (mobile phone novels) reflect, expand and remediate older media practices. In particular, I explore some of the possibilities and limits of this phenomenon and how it is impacting upon twenty-first century paradigms for creative practice and labour.