Статті в журналах з теми "MULTI-CUE OBJECT"

We present an unsupervised approach for factorizing object appearance into highlight, shading, and albedo layers, trained by multi-view real images. To do so, we construct a multi-view dataset by collecting numerous customer product photos online, which exhibit large illumination variations that make them suitable for training of reflectance separation and can facilitate object-level decomposition. The main contribution of our approach is a proposed image representation based on local color distributions that allows training to be insensitive to the local misalignments of multi-view images. In addition, we present a new guidance cue for unsupervised training that exploits synergy between highlight separation and intrinsic image decomposition. Over a broad range of objects, our technique is shown to yield state-of-the-art results for both of these tasks.

The shot planning of a cue after it collides with an object ball determines a player's success in a billiard game. This paper proposes three novel gaming strategies to investigate the effect of cue shots planning on gaming performance. The first algorithm considers the nearest pocket for every selected target object ball, seeking optimal post collision positions. The second algorithm considers all pocket and target object ball combinations during both the pre- and post-collision optimal shot selection processes. The third algorithm considers a multi-objective optimization process for optimal shot planning control. The simulations are conducted based on a collision model considering the restitution effects. An augmented reality training facility is devised to guide users in both aiming and cue repositioning control in a real-world billiard game. Experimental results not only prove the reliability of our training device in selecting a proper shot sequence using the all-pocket optimal shot planning algorithm, but it also proves the consistency with the restitution theory.

RGB-Depth (RGB-D) cameras are widely used in computer vision and robotics applications such as 3D modeling and human–computer interaction. To capture 3D information of an object from different viewpoints simultaneously, we need to use multiple RGB-D cameras. To minimize costs, the cameras are often sparsely distributed without shared scene features. Due to the advantage of being visible from different viewpoints, spherical objects have been used for extrinsic calibration of widely-separated cameras. Assuming that the projected shape of the spherical object is circular, this paper presents a multi-cue-based method for detecting circular regions in a single color image. Experimental comparisons with existing methods show that our proposed method accurately detects spherical objects with cluttered backgrounds under different illumination conditions. The circle detection method is then applied to extrinsic calibration of multiple RGB-D cameras, for which we propose to use robust cost functions to reduce errors due to misdetected sphere centers. Through experiments, we show that the proposed method provides accurate calibration results in the presence of outliers and performs better than a least-squares-based method.

The salient object detection (SOD) technology predicts which object will attract the attention of an observer surveying a particular scene. Most state-of-the-art SOD methods are top-down mechanisms that apply fully convolutional networks (FCNs) of various structures to RGB images, extract features from them, and train a network. However, owing to the variety of factors that affect visual saliency, securing sufficient features from a single color space is difficult. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multi-color space network (MCSNet) to detect salient objects using various saliency cues. First, the images were converted to HSV and grayscale color spaces to obtain saliency cues other than those provided by RGB color information. Each saliency cue was fed into two parallel VGG backbone networks to extract features. Contextual information was obtained from the extracted features using atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP). The features obtained from both paths were passed through the attention module, and channel and spatial features were highlighted. Finally, the final saliency map was generated using a step-by-step residual refinement module (RRM). Furthermore, the network was trained with a bidirectional loss to supervise saliency detection results. Experiments on five public benchmark datasets showed that our proposed network achieved superior performance in terms of both subjective results and objective metrics.

Moving target detection plays a primary and pivotal role in avionics visual analysis, which aims to completely and accurately detect moving objects from complex backgrounds. However, due to the relatively small sizes of targets in aerial video, many deep networks that achieve success in normal size object detection are usually accompanied by a high rate of false alarms and missed detections. To address this problem, we propose a novel visual detail augmented mapping approach for small aerial target detection. Concretely, we first present a multi-cue foreground segmentation algorithm including motion and grayscale information to extract potential regions. Then, based on the visual detail augmented mapping approach, the regions that might contain moving targets are magnified to multi-resolution to obtain detailed target information and rearranged into new foreground space for visual enhancement. Thus, original small targets are mapped to a more efficient foreground augmented map which is favorable for accurate detection. Finally, driven by the success of deep detection network, small moving targets can be well detected from aerial video. Experiments extensively demonstrate that the proposed method achieves success in small aerial target detection without changing the structure of the deep network. In addition, compared with the-state-of-art object detection algorithms, it performs favorably with high efficiency and robustness.

We recently reported evidence indicating that selective attention is deployed to a target location in a multi-object display, when the target event (a change of one of the objects) is preceded by subliminal flicker in the gamma range. However, concerns have been raised regarding the stimuli used in this study and the possible contribution of an artifactual cue: a “transition flash” between pretarget flicker offset and target onset. Here, we report a series of experiments investigating the existence and potential contribution to selective attention of this transition-flash cue under different presentation conditions. We find that, although the transition flash is a real phenomenon (detection rates ≃ 15% > chance), it cannot, on its own, explain the original effects of gamma flicker on the response time to target detection. Even after eliminating this flash, detection was significantly faster, or more accurate, for targets preceded (vs. not preceded) by flicker. This congruency effect (≈15 ms) demonstrates that gamma flicker on its own is sufficient to engage selective attention. This interpretation is further strengthened by a reevaluation of 1) experiment 7 reported by van Diepen and colleagues and 2) the validity effect experiment reported by Bauer and colleagues. Possible reasons for the discrepant results are also discussed.

Region proposal network (RPN) based trackers employ the classification and regression block to generate the proposals, the proposal that contains the highest similarity score is formulated to be the groundtruth candidate of next frame. However, region proposal network based trackers cannot make the best of the features from different convolutional layers, and the original loss function cannot alleviate the data imbalance issue of the training procedure. We propose the Spatial Cascaded Transformed RPN to combine the RPN and STN (spatial transformer network) together, in order to successfully obtain the proposals of high quality, which can simultaneously improves the robustness. The STN can transfer the spatial transformed features though different stages, which extends the spatial representation capability of such networks handling complex scenarios such as scale variation and affine transformation. We break the restriction though an easy samples penalization loss (shrinkage loss) instead of smooth L1 function. Moreover, we perform the multi-cue proposals re-ranking to guarantee the accuracy of the proposed tracker. We extensively prove the effectiveness of our proposed method on the ablation studies of the tracking datasets, which include OTB-2015 (Object Tracking Benchmark 2015), VOT-2018 (Visual Object Tracking 2018), LaSOT (Large Scale Single Object Tracking), TrackingNet (A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild) and UAV123 (UAV Tracking Dataset).

Diffusion-based salient region detection methods have gained great popularity. In most diffusion-based methods, the saliency values are ranked on 2-layer neighborhood graph by connecting each node to its neighboring nodes and the nodes sharing common boundaries with its neighboring nodes. However, only considering the local relevance between neighbors, the salient region may be heterogeneous and even wrongly suppressed, especially when the features of salient object are diverse. In order to address the issue, we present an effective saliency detection method using diffusing process on the graph with nonlocal connections. First, a saliency-biased Gaussian model is used to refine the saliency map based on the compactness cue, and then, the saliency information of compactness is diffused on 2-layer sparse graph with nonlocal connections. Second, we obtain the contrast of each superpixel by restricting the reference region to the background. Similarly, a saliency-biased Gaussian refinement model is generated and the saliency information based on the uniqueness cue is propagated on the 2-layer sparse graph. We linearly integrate the initial saliency maps based on the compactness and uniqueness cues due to the complementarity to each other. Finally, to obtain a highlighted and homogeneous saliency map, a single-layer updating and multi-layer integrating scheme is presented. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs better in terms of various evaluation metrics.

AbstractObjectives: Previous studies have reported impairments in activities of daily living (ADL) performance in the presence of irrelevant but physically/functionally related objects in dementia patients. The aim of the present study was to increase our knowledge about the impact of the presence of contextually related non-target objects on ADL execution in patients with multi-domain mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia. Methods: We compared ADL execution in patients with MCI, dementia, and healthy elderly participants under two experimental conditions: One in which the target objects were embedded with contextually related non-target items that constituted the object set necessary to complete two additional (but unrequired) ADL tasks related to the target task, and a second, control condition where target objects were surrounded by isolated objects (they never constituted a whole set needed to complete an alternative ADL task). Results: Separate analysis of ADL errors associated with the target task versus errors involving the non-target objects revealed that, although the presence of contextually related objects facilitated the accomplishment of the target task, such a condition also led to errors involving the use of irrelevant objects in dementia and MCI. Conclusions: The presence of contextually related non-target items produces both positive and negative effects on ADL performance. These types of non-target objects might help to cue the retrieval of the action schema related to the target task, particularly in patients with MCI. In contrast, the presence of these objects might also lead to distraction in dementia and MCI. (JINS, 2017, 23, 481–492)

Over the decades, the use of environmental enrichment has evolved from a necessary treatment to a “best practice” in virtually all wildlife care settings. The breadth of this evolution has widened to include more complex inputs, comprehensive evaluation of efficacy, and countless commercially available products designed to provide for a myriad of species-typical needs. Environmental enrichment, however, remains almost inexorably based on the provision of inputs (objects, manipulanda, or other sensory stimuli) intended to enhance an environment or prolong a specific behavior. Considerable effort has been put into developing enrichment strategies based on behavioral outcomes to shift the paradigm from the traditional input-heavy process. We believe that this trajectory can be enhanced through Outcome-Based Husbandry using an ethologically based workflow tool with a universal application (regardless of species) that flushes out inputs based on desired outcomes, which can then be incorporated into daily care or layered to create sensory cue-based multi-day events. Furthermore, we believe that this strategy can drive practitioners from the confines of traditional enrichment and the object-based approach into a dynamic and holistic husbandry program that synthesizes complex experiences into regular animal care, rather than supplementing husbandry with input-based enrichment. Focusing on an animal’s complete experience and outcomes that promote competence building and the highest level of agency allows the animals, not care staff, to make meaningful decisions that impact their present and future selves.

Abstract Despite current literature suggesting that various social cognitive processes seem to be impaired in late adulthood, e.g., processing of social gaze cues, the trajectory decline of social cognition in late adulthood is not well understood (e.g., Grainger et al., 2018; Paal & Bereczkei, 2007). As part of a multi-institutional research project, we began to systematically investigate whether there is age-related decline in older adults’ ability to infer others’ mental states, integrate multiple referential cues, and identify emotional states of others using prosodic cues. Sixteen older adults aged 71-85, of which 9 were cognitively healthy and 7 with mild-to-moderate dementia, and 7 younger adults aged 19-37 underwent three tasks. In a theory-of-mind story task, participants answered true/false questions about the beliefs of the protagonists in the stories. A cue integration task assessed participants’ ability to integrate the experimenter’s gaze and semantic cues to identify a referent object. In an emotion-prosody task, participants judged whether the speaker sounded happy or sad in low-pass filtered audio. Non-parametric tests revealed that younger adults outperformed both groups of older adults (both ps=.001) in inferring the protagonists’ beliefs in the stories. Younger adults were also better and more accurate than both groups of older adults in integrating cues to identify the referent object and in using prosodic cues to identify emotional states respectively (ps<.001). Both groups of older adults did not differ significantly from each other in the tasks. These findings provide emerging and important insights into the decline of social cognitive processes in late adulthood.

This article critically engages with the political strategies of the new social and political movements that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-8. It takes issue with discussions of contemporary alter-political practice and theory that overlook the crucial point that the creation of new social institutions and relations in the here and now - a central part of this politics - must itself be political: it argues for the need to tackle the whole question of the collective subject and agent of change. This leads into a discussion of the theory of hegemony put forward by Gramsci, and, later, Laclau and Mouffe, and, drawing on this, a new strategy is proposed, for the construction of powerful collective subjects. Taking its cue from recent social movements such as 15M (the Indignados) and new municipalism in Spain and Italy, it looks at new ways of configuring the strategy of hegemony, by making its concepts of leadership, unity and representation more participatory, bottom-up, accessible to ordinary people, plural and flexible. A historical transition to egalitarian democracies, solidary economies and environmental sustainability is dependent on a wider counter-hegemonic project and contest. This needs to be carried out in all social relations and fields. It must energise critical masses on the ground, and conjoin institutional interventions with new social invention and multiple assaults on the status quo. The object of a contemporary alter-political organisation should be to animate, bolster and help articulate the multi-faceted texture of current oppositional and constructive activities, re-instituting the social in all its far-reaching diversity and complexity.

In this paper, we propose a novel ship detection model based on multi-cue visual attention mechanism, which include two steps. Firstly, the model acquires salient candidate regions across entire scene by using a bottom-up visual attention cue. The cue is saliency analysis method based on visual contrast. Then, a analysis method based on the environment around the ship is used to distinguish between ship and harbor.The method dont use the shape, edge or other forms of features of the ship objects. The ship detection results prove our method can effectively concentrate on the objects with greater contrast and distinguish between ship and harbor.

In order to solve the problem that human objects in complex environments would be affected by illumination, deformation, moving, etc, a multi-feature information fusion based video tracking approach was proposed. In a particle filter framework, both the face color information and the head contour cue were fused effectively.This method overcomed the instability brought by using a single measurement source, and improved the tracking accuracy and reliability. Experiments on real video sequences demonstrate that in the same case our approach has more reliable performance than trackers utilizing only color or contour information with particle filter.

To promote collaboration across canine science, address replicability issues, and advance open science practices within animal cognition, we have launched the ManyDogs consortium, modeled on similar ManyX projects in other fields. We aimed to create a collaborative network that (a) uses large, diverse samples to investigate and replicate findings, (b) promotes open science practices of pre-registering hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans, (c) investigates the influence of differences across populations and breeds, and (d) examines how different research methods and testing environments influence the robustness of results. Our first study combines a phenomenon that appears to be highly reliable—dogs’ ability to follow human pointing—with a question that remains controversial: do dogs interpret pointing as a social communicative gesture or as a simple associative cue? We collected data (N = 455) from 20 research sites on two conditions of a 2-alternative object choice task: (1) Ostensive (pointing to a baited cup after making eye-contact and saying the dog’s name); (2) Non-ostensive (pointing without eye-contact, after a throat-clearing auditory control cue). Comparing performance between conditions, while both were significantly above chance, there was no significant difference in dogs’ responses. This result was consistent across sites. Further, we found that dogs followed contralateral, momentary pointing at lower rates than has been reported in prior research, suggesting that there are limits to the robustness of point-following behavior: not all pointing styles are equally likely to elicit a response. Together, these findings underscore the important role of procedural details in study design and the broader need for replication studies in canine science.

The presentation of an auditory stimulus semantically-congruent with a visual element of a multi-objects display can enhance processing of that element. Here we used multisensory objects (MO) as non-informative cues in a spatial cueing paradigm, aiming to directly assess the interplay between MO integration and spatial attention. We presented two pictures (e.g., left — dog, right — cat) plus a central sound (e.g., a dog’s bark) that defined the location of the MO (left, in this example). This was followed by a target (a Gabor patch) either at the MO location or in the opposite hemifield. Subjects discriminated the orientation of the Gabor, while ignoring all task-irrelevant pictures and sounds. Further, we manipulated the task requirements including ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’ discrimination (Gabor tilt = ±5° or ±10°), and by presenting either a single unilateral Gabor (Exp. 1, ‘low’ competition) or two Gabors bilaterally (red and blue, with the target now defined by colour; Exp. 2, ‘high’ competition). Functional imaging data revealed activation of frontal regions when the target was presented on the opposite side of the MO (invalid trials). The frontal eye-fields activated irrespective of task requirements, while the inferior frontal gyrus activated only when the MO-cue was invalid and competition was low (Exp. 1 only). These findings show that MOs automatically affect the distribution of spatial attention, and that re-orienting operations on invalid trials activate dorsal and ventral frontal areas depending on top-down task constraints. Overall, the results are consistent with the hypothesis linking the integration of multisensory objects with biases of spatial attention.

Thermal cues provide information about the thermal properties of an object held in the hand. These cues can be simulated in a thermal display and used to assist in identifying the object. Two experiments were conducted using a thermal display that simulated the cues associated with contact with different materials. The thermal contact model was based on a semi-infinite body model that included thermal contact resistance and blood perfusion. Its performance was evaluated in two experiments, the first of which involved discriminating between simulated materials, and in the second, subjects were required to identify simulated materials based on the thermal cues presented to one, three, or five fingers. The results from the first experiment indicated that when the temperature profile associated with contact with a real material is presented to the finger, subjects can use this cue to discriminate between simulated materials. Their performance on this task is comparable to that achieved with real materials with similar thermal properties. In the second experiment, the accuracy with which subjects identified a simulated material based on thermal cues improved as the number of fingers stimulated increased, suggesting that spatial summation of cold occurs when the area stimulated is noncontiguous. However, most of the improvement in identifying materials occurred when the display presented thermal cues to three as compared to one finger, with little further enhancement in performance when five fingers were stimulated. These results indicate that thermal displays can be used effectively to present information about the material composition of objects in virtual environments.

Sharing our feelings through content with images and short videos is one main way of expression on social networks. Visual content can affect people’s emotions, which makes the task of analyzing the sentimental information of visual content more and more concerned. Most of the current methods focus on how to improve the local emotional representations to get better performance of sentiment analysis and ignore the problem of how to perceive objects of different scales and different emotional intensity in complex scenes. In this paper, based on the alterable scale and multi-level local regional emotional affinity analysis under the global perspective, we propose a multi-level context pyramid network (MCPNet) for visual sentiment analysis by combining local and global representations to improve the classification performance. Firstly, Resnet101 is employed as backbone to obtain multi-level emotional representation representing different degrees of semantic information and detailed information. Next, the multi-scale adaptive context modules (MACM) are proposed to learn the sentiment correlation degree of different regions for different scale in the image, and to extract the multi-scale context features for each level deep representation. Finally, different levels of context features are combined to obtain the multi-cue sentimental feature for image sentiment classification. Extensive experimental results on seven commonly used visual sentiment datasets illustrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, especially the accuracy on the FI dataset exceeds 90%.

Against the background of the ongoing atmospheric warming, the glacial lakes that are nourished and expanded in High Mountain Asia pose growing risks of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) hazards and increasing threats to the downstream areas. Effectively extracting the area and consistently monitoring the dynamics of these lakes are of great significance in predicting and preventing GLOF events. To automatically extract the lake areas, many deep learning (DL) methods capable of capturing the multi-level features of lakes have been proposed in segmentation and classification tasks. However, the portability of these supervised DL methods need to be improved in order to be directly applied to different data sources, as they require laborious effort to collect the labeled lake masks. In this work, we proposed a simple glacial lake extraction model (SimGL) via weakly-supervised contrastive learning to extend and improve the extraction performances in cases that lack the labeled lake masks. In SimGL, a Siamese network was employed to learn similar objects by maximizing the similarity between the input image and its augmentations. Then, a simple Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) map was provided as the location cue instead of the labeled lake masks to constrain the model to capture the representations related to the glacial lakes and the segmentations to coincide with the true lake areas. Finally, the experimental results of the glacial lake extraction on the 1540 Landsat-8 image patches showed that our approach, SimGL, offers a competitive effort with some supervised methods (such as Random Forest) and outperforms other unsupervised image segmentation methods in cases that lack true image labels.

Abstract Background With the emergence of Web 3.0 era, more and more enterprises begin to pay attention to the research of “personalization”. Personalized recommendation is not only through the simple classification of users' basic attributes, but also through the collection of various content data generated by users on the network, in-depth analysis of text, statistics of user behavior and other methods to find hidden user interests, so as to provide personalized services more accurately. As a data analysis tool, user portrait model can better obtain the effective information of users and describe the characteristics of user groups. It is widely used in personalized recommendation, precision marketing, behavior prediction, anomaly detection and other fields to improve service efficiency and user satisfaction. Research Objects and Methods Analyze and quantify the emotion of the comment text in detail. After extracting the main aspects of users' attention to the product, the real emotion expressed by users who buy the product is calculated, and a user portrait model with multi-attribute features is proposed. This paper constructs a multi-dimensional user portrait index system from four aspects: user basic attributes, interaction attributes, feedback attributes, psychological and emotional attributes and situational attributes. Secondly, based on entropy theory, the overall interaction value a is calculated according to the interaction index value; Then, the user evaluation SC and user comment emotion se are taken as the indicators of user feedback attributes. Then, TF-IDF method is used to distinguish the important features of users' psychological interest, and the feature weight of interaction index is obtained to show the differences between users. Finally, a portrait model considering emotional factors is established. In order to verify the impact of user portrait model on customer emotion, this study uses relevant women (half and half) to participate in this study. The experimental design, screening method, dependent variable index and experimental method are the same as above. Examples of receiving instructions are as follows: the red circle will prompt, and then there will be negative emotional stimulation. Even if it makes me feel unhappy, it is normal. I should fully accept the unpleasant feeling and let my feeling flow naturally without controlling it. The guidelines for avoidance are as follows: the red circle will prompt, and then there will be negative emotional stimulation. Although I don't know what the specific content is, I should try my best to avoid this stimulation and avoid this negative emotional feeling. A series of experiments were conducted to explore how different cognitive styles of healthy individuals affect the emotional effects caused by expectation and the regulation of expectation on the emotional arousal of subsequent stimuli. Study 4.3 intends to further investigate whether and how adaptive cognitive style training can change the excessive negative expectations of anxiety patients (taking high trait anxiety as an example), so as to intervene in clinical anxiety symptoms. This study intends to screen and recruit 180 subjects with high trait anxiety from college students (90 men and 90 women). According to previous studies, it is planned to measure the State Trait Anxiety Questionnaire (measuring the level of state anxiety and trait anxiety) and the positive emotion Negative Emotion Scale (measuring mood state) among college students. Subjects with more than 85% of the normal distribution of trait anxiety scores were regarded as subjects with high trait anxiety. The above subjects were randomly divided into four groups: separate reappraisal training group, active reappraisal training group, training group and their respective control group (30 in each group, half male and half female). Before starting the cognitive style training program, the negative expectations and emotional effects of the subjects in the experimental group and the control group (taking behavior, skin electricity and EEG as indicators) were pretested. The negative expected intensity was measured by uncertain cue. Results The subjects in the experimental group then received cognitive style training, and the subjects in the control group received control training for 3 months. After the training, the four groups of subjects were measured again for state trait anxiety, negative expected intensity and positive effect scale. Through the comparison between the experimental group and the control group, finally comprehensively evaluate the intervention effect of cognitive style training on excessive negative expectation and trait anxiety symptoms. Conclusions The model can describe the interests and preferences of different user groups more carefully and accurately, and provide effective support for personalized services. In short, we should integrate relevant designs according to our own advantages and characteristics. With the goal of excellent brand design examples, regularly hold successful model sharing, experience introduction, project display and other activities, establish successful brand examples for building customers' positive emotions, clarify the specific objectives of the activities, give full play to the concentration of professionals, high IQ and professional knowledge in the commercial field, give full play to the advantages of talents and intelligence, and organize experts and scholars to form a professional bid winning guidance team, Give full play to the role of professional experts and scholars in commercial projects in this field and carry out scientific research on relevant projects. Acknowledgments This work was supported by Philosophy and Social Science Planning project of Anhui Province under Grant No. AHSKF2021D31.

Reflection is common when we see through a glass window, which not only is a visual disturbance but also influences the performance of computer vision algorithms. Removing the reflection from a single image, however, is highly ill-posed since the color at each pixel needs to be separated into two values belonging to the clear background and the reflection respectively. To solve this, existing methods use additional priors such as reflection layer smoothness, double reflection effect, and color consistency to distinguish the two layers. However, these low-level priors may not be consistently valid in real cases. In this paper, inspired by the fact that human beings can separate the two layers easily by recognizing the objects and understanding the scene, we propose to use the object semantic cue, which is high-level information, as the guidance to help reflection removal. Based on the data analysis, we develop a multi-task end-to-end deep learning method with a semantic guidance component, to solve reflection removal and semantic segmentation jointly. Extensive experiments on different datasets show significant performance gain when using high-level object-oriented information. We also demonstrate the application of our method to other computer vision tasks.

AbstractDeep Neutral Networks (DNNs) have been widely used in many applications, such as self-driving cars, natural language processing (NLP), image classification, visual object recognition, and so on. Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based Multiprocessor System on a Chip (MPSoC) is recently considered one of the popular choices for deploying DNN models. However, the limited resource capacity of MPSoC imposes a challenge for such practical implementation. Recent studies revealed the trade-off between the “resources consumed" vs. the “performance achieved". Taking a cue from these findings, we address the problem of efficient implementation of deep learning into the resource-constrained MPSoC in this paper, where each deep learning network is run with different service levels based on resource usage (where a higher service level implies higher performance with increased resource consumption). To this end, we propose a heuristic-based strategy, Application Wise Level Selector (AWLS), for selecting service levels to maximize the overall performance subject to a given resource bound. AWLS can achieve higher performance within a constrained resource budget under various simulation scenarios. Further, we verify the proposed strategy using an AMD-Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ XCZU9EG SoC. Using a framework designed to deploy multi-DNN on multi-DPUs (Deep Learning Units), it is proved that an optimal solution is achieved from the algorithm, which obtains the highest performance (Frames Per Second) using the same resource budget.

Abstract Background We developed five tablet-based tasks (applications) to measure multiple components of manual dexterity. Aim: to test reliability and validity of tablet-based dexterity measures in healthy participants. Methods Tasks included: (1) Finger recognition to assess mental rotation capacity. The subject taps with the finger indicated on a virtual hand in three orientations (reaction time, correct trials). (2) Rhythm tapping to evaluate timing of finger movements performed with, and subsequently without, an auditory cue (inter-stimulus interval). (3) Multi-finger tapping to assess independent finger movements (reaction time, correct trials, unwanted finger movements). (4) Sequence tapping to assess production and memorization of visually cued finger sequences (successful taps). (5) Line-tracking to assess movement speed and accuracy while tracking an unpredictably moving line on the screen with the fingertip (duration, error). To study inter-rater reliability, 34 healthy subjects (mean age 35 years) performed the tablet tasks twice with two raters. Relative reliability (Intra-class correlation, ICC) and absolute reliability (Standard error of measurement, SEM) were established. Task validity was evaluated in 54 healthy subjects (mean age 49 years, range: 20–78 years) by correlating tablet measures with age, clinical dexterity assessments (time taken to pick-up objects in Box and Block Test, BBT and Moberg Pick Up Test, MPUT) and with measures obtained using a finger force-sensor device. Results Most timing measures showed excellent reliability. Poor to excellent reliability was found for correct trials across tasks, and reliability was poor for unwanted movements. Inter-session learning occurred in some measures. Age correlated with slower and more variable reaction times in finger recognition, less correct trials in multi-finger tapping, and slower line-tracking. Reaction times correlated with those obtained using a finger force-sensor device. No significant correlations between tablet measures and BBT or MPUT were found. Inter-task correlation among tablet-derived measures was weak. Conclusions Most tablet-based dexterity measures showed good-to-excellent reliability (ICC ≥ 0.60) except for unwanted movements during multi-finger tapping. Age-related decline in performance and association with finger force-sensor measures support validity of tablet measures. Tablet-based components of dexterity complement conventional clinical dexterity assessments. Future work is required to establish measurement properties in patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Introduction The blockbuster DreamWorks film Shrek is a play on the classic fairy tale narrative, where the hero, atop his noble steed, rescues the cursed princess from a dragon-guarded tower. Except the hero is an Ogre, the steed is a talking donkey, the dragon just wants to be loved, and, when they finally break the curse, the princess permanently transforms into an Ogre. From the opening scene, the first movie subverts the viewers’ expectations, offering reflection as well as a critique on “some of the cultural conventions that characterise modernity” (Lacassagne, Nieguth, and Dépelteau). As one of the most successful animated films in history (Lacassagne, Nieguth, and Dépelteau) Shrek is an important text to analyse from a disability perspective. As Amanda Taylor suggests, the film introduces several disability themes that work together to make a social and cultural critique about social exclusion: there are many social and cultural issues within the movie Shrek that should be addressed when looking through a lens of disability. Shrek and Fiona are the very opposite of what society looks at as a fairy tale, yet they are still so popular. The producers of this movie have tackled social issues in a very positive way. Elements such as obesity and economic diversity are portrayed within this movie that show that there is an alternative to stereotyping. Taking Shrek as its case study, this article argues that monstrous images offer complex representations of disability that align with the affirmation model of disability. We begin with a review of key literature before starting a disability analysis of Shrek by drawing parallels between the social exclusion experienced by characters within the film and the effects of social disablement identified within the social model of disability and critical disability studies. We then move beyond the social model of disability to follow the importance of interdependence and disability pride throughout Shrek as it culminates in a representation of the affirmation model of disability. Throughout this article we make parallels between monsters, ogres, freaks (as a form of the monstrous), and characters with disability. Each as constructed as having extraordinary bodies—the non-normative. Reading Monsters through a Disability Lens Critical disability studies theorists often observe the way disability is used within narratives as a metaphor for something else (Mitchell and Snyder; Quayson; Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies; Garland-Thomson Freakery). For Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, this is particularly illustrative in the figure of the monster in literary narratives: the word monster — perhaps the earliest and most enduring name for a singular body — derives from the Latin monstra, meaning to warn, show, or sign, and which has given us the modern verb demonstrate. (Garland-Thomson, Freakery 3) Disability has become a defining characteristic of the monstrous body—“bodies that in their gross failure to approximate to corporeal norms are radically excluded” (Shildrick 2). The field of critical disability studies is concerned with the ways these norms are constructed to exclude certain bodies. Jobling notes that the typical figure of the ogre occurs in folklore across many cultures around the world. The ogre performs the function of “a semi-human monster who commits crimes against the ingroup. The hero triumphs over the ogre, usually by killing him” (Jobling). Ogres, depicted as inhumanly large monstrous characters who eat children, are recognisable as a source of fear. The ogre occupies an important position as a narrative prosthesis (see Mitchell and Snyder) in children’s narratives. The monster therefore exists within narratives as a representation of something else. Reading monsters through a disability lens has been well researched in the critical disability studies field. Studies show how monstrosity is represented in film through disfigurement, typically in contrast to the normative or non-disabled body (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies). Feminist theory is often applied to gain an insight into “the meanings attributed to the bodies by cultural representation and the consequences of those meanings in the world” (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies). While several critical disability critiques emphasise the negative disability stereotypes associated with representations of monsters, increasingly theorists are considering the ways these monsters problematise and critique the social construction of the normate (Smith). Martha Stoddard Holmes’s Born This Way: Reading Frankenstein with Disability is a notable example of how a monstrous character poses both a critique and representation of society. The Creature forms a “visual identity first from the stares, words, and behaviours of others". She observes “his condition of disability and resulting social exclusion are, as narrated, purely aesthetic in nature, and as such, socially constructed”. Throughout the text, the Creature exemplifies both monstrosity to be feared and vulnerability to be pitied; these are features outlined by Margrit Shildrick as concepts that underpin the non-normative body in popular culture. It is evident that the perception of monstrosity is one that is socially constructed, and is largely negative. Susan Marie Schweik suggests a relationship between this negative representation and the ugly laws. The ugly laws refer to a set of laws that prohibited ugly people from participating in society during 1860s through to 1974. The ugly laws focus on non-normative bodies, especially bodies that were disfigured. The phrasing of these laws was such that it removed the personhood of so-called ugly people. For example, in the quote “so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets” (Schweik), the people phrasing the law objectify its subjects. These archaic ugly laws reflected a societal view that ugly people were frightening to behold, which manifests in fear of the person themselves. Thus, images of non-normative bodies in film and literature were reflected as frightening monsters. These representations described are the typical depiction of non-normative monstrous bodies. While monsters have been consistently read through a disability lens, we aim to demonstrate through this article the importance of representations such as Shrek, as they depict a move towards disability pride and an affirmative model of disability. The Affirmative Model of Disability The affirmative model was developed as part of the disability arts movement. Colin Cameron (Disability Arts 11) asserts “the affirmation model identifies impairment as an important part of people’s identities, to be owned as part of who they are, and not as something to be hidden or regarded as a source of shame". He locates the negative representations of disability in texts mentioned above as a reflection of the values and assumptions related to the medical model of disability. While the medical model positions disability as a problem within the body, the social model locates this so-called problem in society. The affirmative model builds on but also critiques the social model of disability. The social model has been criticised by feminists with disability as over-emphasising “socio-structural barriers and ignoring personal and experiential aspects of disability” (Cameron Developing an Affirmation Model 24). However, the affirmative model retains the definition of disability as being located in social structures, with the addition of a subversion of the dominant cultural narrative which views disability or impairment as inherently negative. While there are still heavily prevalent issues with stereotypes in media, and people with disability continue to be invoked in narratives of monsters a serious attempt to work with people with disability on authentic and positive representation is gaining traction. Inspired by the 2020 Oscar-nominated documentary film Crip Camp, Netflix-backed documentary filmmakers with disability organisation FWD-Doc has partnered with social impact company Doc Society to release A Toolkit for Inclusion & Accessibility to positively influence disability representation and media access (Mitchell; FWD-Doc and Doc Society). This inclusion toolkit ascribes to the affirmative model of disability and makes the following recommendations that in films: people with disability are seen as multi-dimensional characters people’s life is seen as valid and valuable there is engagement in the disability community disability pride is shown intersectionality is shown allyship is shown good-quality audio description and captioning is used disability is not seen as tragic disability is not seen as inspiring disability is not used a punchline people overcoming disability are not shown people with disability are not infantilised no ableist language is used. The following section offers a thematic analysis of Shrek that draws on FWD-Doc’s recommendations. Although almost all these recommendations are achieved in Shrek, this article will focus on the most relevant instances. Findings: Setting Up a Normative Society Due to space limitations we have focussed on the first film in the Shrek franchise in this article. However, at the time of writing this there are four films, a few TV spin-offs, and a Broadway musical production. Lacassagne, Nieguth, and Dépelteau suggest that the first three films form a trilogy based on the original book and follow a “high level of thematic unity”, which continues the reflections and critiques of cultural conventions that are outlined in this article. However the spin-offs and fourth film are suggested to have departed from this thematic structure. The opening scene of Shrek is a fairy tale book being read by a narrator. It is a typical story of a princess being rescued by a handsome knight from a dragon-guarded tower. As the story nears its end, a page of the book is torn out and we hear the narrator say, “what a load of *flushing sound*”. This introduction is setting up an expectation of a film that will subvert the norms, and the film delivers. The viewer is introduced to a multi-dimensional title character who seems joyful, proud, independent, and comfortable in himself. He has hobbies; he paints, cooks, and reads. Despite his looks, he is not at all the typical figure of the ogre. Although audiences are introduced to this proud character of Shrek, we soon see that the world he lives in does not treat him positively. Shrek encounters a group of townspeople that are coming to kill him. He tries to scare them away but they are frozen in place, gawking at him. This is indicative of Garland-Thomson’s concept of the stare referred to earlier in this article. The stare occurs when normative members of society encounter people viewed as the other, monsters, and freaks. The stare is depicted as something fascinating and potentially horrifying that compels people to be unable to look away. After encountering this representation of a society that doesn’t accept him, Shrek meets Donkey. Donkey is hiding from people who would persecute him for being different and immediately identifies Shrek as another “freak” and thus an ally. However, Shrek has a harder time accepting that someone might not immediately dismiss him as a monster. Shrek: Listen, little donkey. Take a look at me. What am I?Donkey: Uh—Really tall?Shrek: No! I’m an Ogre. You know. “Grab your torch and pitchforks.” Doesn’t that bother you?Donkey: Nope.Shrek: Really?Donkey: Really, really.Shrek: Oh.Donkey: Man, I like you. What's your name?Shrek: Uh, Shrek.Donkey: Shrek? Well, you know what I like about you, Shrek? You got that kind of I-don't-care-what-nobody-thinks-of-me thing. I like that. I respect that, Shrek. You all right. Although Shrek is comfortable in himself, he has built an opinion based on the view he takes from others. Much like Frankenstein’s monster (Stoddard Holmes), this view is aesthetic in nature and socially constructed. The viewer is then introduced to Lord Maximus Farquaad, who is a fitting representation of someone enforcing the Shrek franchise’s version of the ugly laws. Lord Farquaad frequently objectifies the “freaks”, referring to them as “it” or “that", and he claims that they are “poisoning my perfect world”. The lordship of Duloc he rules over is thus representative of normative society, with a welcoming song that claims Duloc as a “perfect town” and warning “don’t make waves, stay in line and we’ll get on just fine”. Duloc is also represented as a society that follows instructions around societal norms, this is done through the use of cue cards that are shown to the on-screen audience telling them how to react, which they follow. These cue cards also offer a commentary on the constructed nature of this perfect society. Farquaad himself is of short stature and therefore ascribes to Kumari Campbell’s observations about the construction of ability. It is only by establishing and then marginalising disability as other that ability can be understood (Kumari Campbell). Upon entering the castle, Shrek is discriminated against solely based on appearance. Guards are ordered to kill him as the crowd cheers on. However, as Shrek begins to display physical prowess in the fight, the crowd begins to cheer for him. This indicates a meritocratic society that finds value in Shrek now that he has shown himself to be skilled physically. Findings: Taking an Affirmative Stance After the film sets up this constructed normative society, Shrek and Donkey venture out and continue to disrupt the typical narrative. When Shrek accepts the quest of rescuing a princess instead of just destroying Farquaad, Donkey asks him why, and Shrek responds by describing actions of a typical ogre: “maybe I could have decapitated an entire village and put their heads on a pike”. Instead, he likens himself to an onion, because “onions have layers”, which reinforces the film’s idea that he is a multi-dimensional character. Donkey questions why he could not have used an analogy that everyone likes, such as parfaits, but Shrek explains it is not about what everyone likes. This is a notable example of an affirmative stance that values him for being multidimensional even if he is not normative. Shrek and Donkey rescue Princess Fiona from the tower. From the moment she is introduced, she says “this is all wrong” and “this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen". This sentiment can be read as an expression of the confusion the viewer is supposed to be feeling due to the subversion of the typical narrative. However, Shrek has been wearing a helmet and Fiona has not seen that he is an Ogre, meaning she is still treating him like a brave knight. When asked to take off his helmet, Shrek refuses. This is the first time we see Shrek as vulnerable or self-conscious. Shrek wants to be seen as something other than an Ogre. The journey back is long and Fiona’s character gains depth. She is portrayed as unconventional, she is not afraid of Shrek, instead she kills birds, eats rats, burps, fights off bandits, and catches bugs for him to eat. The relationship between Shrek and Fiona grows and Donkey advocates for them to be together, however Shrek is convinced that nobody could see him as anything other than an Ogre. Donkey points out that he did not. Donkey: What exactly is your problem? What do you got against the world?Shrek: I'm not the one with the problem. It’s the world that seems to have a problem. People take one look at me and go, “Aah! Help! Run! A big, stupid, ugly, Ogre!” (Sighs) They judge me before they even know me. That's why I’m better off alone.Donkey: You know? When we met, I didn’t think you were just a big, stupid, ugly, ogre.Shrek: Yeah. I know. Donkey is demonstrating how their shared experience of being “freaks” meant that he accepted his friend from the beginning. This is a notable example of disability community. Donkey then discovers Fiona turns into an Ogre at night. After his initial shock, he agrees she is “ugly” but does not show any indication that he cares about it or that it makes her any less valuable to him. This lack of a negative reaction is challenging for Fiona because she harbours self-hatred, similar to the internalised ableism prevalent in some people with disability. This internalised ableism is often based on a desire to be ‘normal’, usually due to a lack of support or exposure to the positive disability community (Blackwater). Donkey tries to help Fiona overcome this internalised stigma, but a miscommunication based on Shrek’s own internalised ableism pulls Shrek and Fiona apart. Donkey, who is quickly becoming the voice of affirmation for the other characters, is ultimately the one who implores Shrek to confront his internalised ableism, and makes him feel loved and accepted. It is important that this comes from another “freak”, as this represents the power in disability community, rather than an able-bodied hero complex that is common in film. This strength in disability community is another notable example of the affirmative model of disability. Shrek and Donkey return to Duloc to confront Farquaad and Fiona. We see more representation of a normative society; the cue cards are present again, illustrating the constructed nature of normative society. Farquaad alludes again to the ugly laws of the lordship he rules over when he states “it’s rude enough being alive when no one wants you” to Shrek. When Fiona reveals herself to be an Ogre, Farquaad immediately rejects her, but she has already found community and affirmation with Shrek. Rather than being defeated by the now-hero Shrek, Farquaad is eaten by Dragon who is subverting the monstrous archetype of the dragon, instead being the ultimate defeater (Lacassagne, Nieguth, and Dépelteau). The crowd claps, indicating it was merely going along with the normative societal views that had been enforced on the community. A final rebellion against the normative society is indicated when the guard crosses out the cue card and writes “aww” in response to Shrek and Fiona’s first kiss. Shrek: Fiona? Fiona. Are you all right?Fiona: Well, yes. But I don’t understand. I’m supposed to be beautiful.Shrek: But you are beautiful. The conclusion is perhaps one of the most poignant representations of the affirmative model. Shrek and Fiona end up back at their swamp where they are free to be Ogres, surrounded by other “freaks” as well as non-freak allies they’ve made along the way. They are flourishing in their proud community, surrounded by intersectional creatures. Although the first Shrek movie is a story about overcoming, it is not about people overcoming their monstrosity/disability. Instead, the film is about people overcoming societal and internalised views that disable them, and embracing a community that takes pride in difference. Conclusion Within critical disability studies, monsters are recognised as existing in the realm of hyper-representation. They are used within narratives to represent and reveal something else. As Garland-Thomson explains, monsters take on a semantic distinction to demonstrate the non-normative body. The ogre in children’s literature and popular culture is a monstrous figure used as a narrative prosthesis to incite fear. Shrek, however, takes this construction of the monster and subverts it to critique the construction of normative characters and societies in children’s narratives. To make this critique, the film draws on the affirmative model of disability and embraces disability pride through the personal journeys of its lead characters Shrek, Donkey and Fiona. References Blackwater, Amelia. “Disability Community – Our Internalised Ableism.” Deafness Forum of Australia 2020. 23 July 2021. <https://www.disabilityaustraliahub.com.au/disability-community-our-internalised-ableism>. Cameron, Colin. “Developing an Affirmation Model of Impairment and Disability.” 2013. ———. “Disability Arts: The Building of Critical Community Politics and Identity.” Politics, Power and Community Development (2016): 199. FWD-Doc, and Doc Society. A Toolkit for Inclusion & Accessibility: Changing the Narrative of Disability in Documentary Film. London: FWD-Doc. Feb. 2021. 2 Aug. 2021 <https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5dd1c2b5a0f7a568485cbedd/t/602d4708d39c1d1154d0902a/1613581716771/FWD-Doc+Toolkit+small.pdf>. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. Freakery : Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ———. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 56–75. . Jobling, Ian. “The Psychological Foundations of the Hero-Ogre Story: A Cross-Cultural Study.” Human Nature 12.3 (2001): 247–272. 2 Aug. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-001-1009-7>. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Kumari Campbell, Fiona. Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009. Lacassagne, Aurélie, Tim Nieguth, and François Dépelteau, eds. Investigating Shrek : Power, Identity, and Ideology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Mitchell, Wendy. “DocSociety, Netflix Launch Groundbreaking Disability and Inclusion Toolkit (Exclusive).” ScreenDaily 25 Feb. 2021. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness : Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York: New York University, 2009. Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage, 2002. Smith, Angela. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2012. Steig, William. Shrek! New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 1990. Stoddard Holmes, Martha. “Born This Way: Reading Frankenstein with Disability.” Literature and Medicine 36.2 (2018): 372–387. Swain, John, and Sally French. “Towards an Affirmation Model of Disability.” Disability & Society 15.4 (2000): 569–582. Taylor, Amanda. “Shrek’s Portrayal of Disability.” Disability in Children’s Literature 5 May 2017. 13 July 2021 <https://disabilityinchildrenslit.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/shreks-portrayal-of-disability>. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Introduction The concept of ‘wellbeing’ is typically thought of in human-centric ways, referring to the affective feelings and bodily sensations that people may have which inform their sense of health, safety, and connection. However, as our everyday lives, identities, relationships, and embodiments become digitised and datafied, ‘wellbeing’ has taken on new practices and meanings. The use of digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices, social media platforms, and networks of information mediate our interactions with others, as well as the ways we conceptualise what it means to be human, including where the body begins and ends. In turn, digital health technologies and ‘wellness’ cultures such as those promoted on social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook have also shaped our understanding of ‘wellness’ and ‘wellbeing’, their parameters, and how they ought to be practiced and felt (Baker; Lupton Digital Health; Lupton et al.). For millennia, aspects of human bodies have been documented and materialised in a variety of ways to help people understand states of health and illness: including relationships to the environments in which they lived. Indigenous and other non-Western cosmologies have long emphasised the kinds of vibrancies and distributed agencies that are part of reciprocal more-than-human ‘manifestings’ of kinships, and have called for all people to adopt the role of stewards of the ecosystem (Bawaka Country et al.; Hernández et al.; Kimmerer; Rots; Todd; Tynan). In Western cultures, ideas of the human body that reach back to ancient times adopt a perspective that viewed the continuous flows of forces (the four humours) in conjunction with the elements of air, wind, earth, and fire inside and outside the body as contributing to states of health or ill health. It was believed that good health was maintained by ensuring a balance between these factors, including acknowledgement of the role played by climactic, ecological, and celestial conditions (Hartnell; Lagay). A more-than-human approach is beginning to be re-introduced into Western cultures through political activism and academic thinking about the harms to the planet caused by human actions, including global warming and climate crises, loss of habitats and ecological biodiversity, increased incidence of extreme weather events such as bushfires, floods, and cyclones, and emerging novel pathogens affecting the health not only of humans but of other living things (Lewis; Lupton Covid Societies; Lupton Internet of Animals; Neimanis et al.). Contemporary Western more-than-human philosophers argue for the importance of acknowledging our kinship with other living and non-living things as a way of repositioning ourselves within the cosmos and working towards better health and wellbeing for the planet (Abram; Braidotti; Plumwood). As these approaches emphasise, health, wellbeing, and kinship are always imbricated within material-social assemblages of humans and non-digital things which are constantly changing, and thereby generating emergent rather than fixed capacities (Lupton "Human-Centric"; Lupton et al.). In this article, we describe our More-than-Human Wellbeing exhibition. To date, new media, Internet, and communication studies have not devoted as much attention to more-than-human theory. It is this more-than-digital and more-than-human approach to health information and wellbeing that marks out our research program as particularly distinctive. Our research focusses on the many and varied digital and non-digital forms that information about health and bodies takes. We are interested in health data as they are made and form part of the objects and activities of people’s everyday lives and aim to expand the human-centric approach offered in digital health by positioning human health and embodiment as always imbricated within more-than-human ecosystems. We acknowledge that all environments (natural and human-built) are intertwined with humans, and that to a greater or lesser extent, all are configured with and through the often exploitative and extractive practices and ideologies of those living in late modern societies in which people are positioned as superior to and autonomous from other living things. Together with more-than-human scholarship, we take inspiration from work in which arts-based, multisensory, and museum curation methods are employed to draw attention to the intertwining of people and ecologies (Endt-Jones; Howes). Our exhibition was planned as a research translation and engagement project, communicating several of our studies’ findings in arts-based media (Lupton "Embodying"). In what follows, we outline the concepts leading to the creation of our exhibits and describe how these pieces materialise and extend more-than-human concepts of wellbeing and care. Five of the exhibits we created for this exhibition are discussed. They all draw on our research findings across a range of studies, together with more-than-human theory and medical history (Lupton "More-Than-Human"). We describe how we used these pieces to materialise more-than-human concepts of health, wellbeing, and kinship in ways that we hoped would provoke critical thought, affective responses, and open capacities for action for contributing to both human and nonhuman flourishing. The background, thinking, and modes of making leading to the creation of ‘Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities’, ‘Smartphone Fungi’, ‘Hand of Signs’, ‘Silken Anatomies’, and ‘Talking/Flowers’ are explained below. Bodily Curios Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Reclaimed timber, found objects, resin 3D prints. 2023. Fig. 1: Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Fig. 2: Detail from Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. The objects we have placed in Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities (figs. 1 and 2) mix together such things from the past as prosthetic human eyeballs and teeth used in medicine and dentistry in earlier eras. This collection of found and manufactured objects, both old and new, draws on the concept of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, also known as cabinets of wonder, which first became popular in the sixteenth century. Artefacts were assembled together for viewing in a room or a display case. The items were chosen for being notable in some way by the curator, including objects from natural history, antiquities, and religious relics, as well as works of art. These collections, purchased, curated, and assembled by members of the nobility or the wealthy as a marker of refinement, knowledge, or social status, were the precursor of museums (Endt-Jones). We see digital devices such as mobile phones as one of a multitude of ways that operate to document and preserve elements of human embodiment – indeed, as contemporary ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Our cabinet also refers to the tradition of medical museums, which display preserved human organs, body parts, and tissue in glass bottles for pedagogical purposes. Under this model of health, specimens of both ‘ideal’ health and also ‘ill’ health – abnormalities in the flesh – were documented as a means of categorising wellbeing. Museums such as these would often treat diseased and disabled bodies as oddities and artefacts of ‘curiosity’. In this work, we reimagine and wind back this way of thinking, through displaying and drawing attention and curiosity towards signs of the body and the everyday. We are showing that wellbeing is more than a process of categorisation, comparison, or measurement of ‘ideal’ or ‘abnormal’; it is in the traces we leave behind us when we return to the earth. Our information data are human remains, moving as endless constellations of the interior and exterior of the body (Lupton Data Selves). In this artwork, both reclaimed wood and 3D-printed resin were used as a synergy between the natural and synthetic. Taking our cue from the manner of display of these items in medical museums, we have added our own curios, including 3D-printed body organs sprouting fungi (fig. 2), as a way of demonstrating the entanglements between humans and the fungal kingdom. Interspersed among these relics of human bodies is a discarded mobile phone with its screen badly shattered. It is displayed as a more recent antiquated object for making images and collecting, storing, and displaying information and images about human bodies, which itself is subject to disastrous events despite its original high-tech veneer of glossy impermeability. Technologies are more-than-flesh as human-made simulacra of body parts. Our wellbeing is sensed and made sense of through bodies’ entanglements of human and nonhuman. These curios both materialise traces of our bodies and wellbeing and extend our bodies into the physical spaces we inhabit and through which we move. Reading the Traces and Signs Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Smartphone Fungi. Recycled European oak, 3D printed resin, CNC carved plywood. 2023 Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Hand of Signs. Laser-etched walnut and plywood. 2023. Fig. 3: Smartphone Fungi. / Fig. 4: Detail from Smartphone Fungi. Wellbeing is also a process of mark-making, realised through the reciprocal impressions we leave on each other and the world around us. In Smart Phone Fungi (figs. 3 and 4) we capture the idea of ‘recording’ that takes place between people, technologies, and the natural world. It was inspired by a huge tree which members of our team noticed on a bush walk in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, Australia. Growing from this tree were fungi of similar size and shape to the smartphone that was used to capture the image. In our interpretation, a piece of reclaimed timber was used to represent the tree, itself marked by its human use, and fungal shapes replicating those on the tree were produced using computer numerical controlled (CNC) carving. The central timber post is covered with human and more-than-human traces, such as old tool marks, weather damage, and wood borer holes. Alongside these traces, the CNC-carved fungi forms add a conspicuously digital layer of human intervention. Fig. 5: Hand of Signs. In Hand of Signs (fig. 5), we extend this idea of both organic and digital data traces as something that can be ‘read’ or interpreted. Inspired by the practice of palmistry, this work re-interprets line reading, the historical wooden anatomical model, and human body scanning as ways of reading for signs of wellbeing in past and future. Palm readers interpret people’s character, health, longevity, and other aspects of their lives through the creases and traces of development, wear, and deteriorations in the skin of our hands (Chinn). Life leaves its traces on our palms. The piece also refers to the newer tradition of digitising human bodies (Lupton Quantified Self; Lupton et al.), employing scanning and data visualising technologies, which uses spatial GPS data to deduce patterns of human activity. For both palmistry and in more contemporary monitoring technologies, one’s wellbeing can be deduced through the map: the lines of the palm and the errant traces collected by satellites and sensors. To reflect this relation between mapping and palmistry, our updated anatomical model references both the contours of 3D geospatial data and of the human palm. However, this piece looks to represent more layers of data beyond those captured by GPS data. By using reclaimed wood to construct this human hand model, we are again making an analogy between the marks of growth and life that timber displays and those that the human body bears and develops as people move through more-than-worlds throughout their lifespans. The piece also seeks to draw attention to the various ‘signs’ that have been used across centuries to interpret the current and future health and wellbeing of humans (once markings on or morphologies of the body, now often the digitised visualisations of the internal operations and physical movements of the body that are generated by digital health technologies), superimposing older and newer modes of corporeal knowledge. Layers of Mediation Megan Rose. Silken Anatomies. Digital print on satin and yoryu silk chiffon. 2023. Ash Watson. Talking/Flowers. Collage and digital inkjet on paper. 2023. Fig. 6: Detail from Silken Anatomies. The ways that we come to sense and understand wellbeing are also mediated through the reproductive interplay of natural and technological elements. Silken Anatomies (fig. 6) was inspired by anatomical prints from the Renaissance showing details of the interiors of human bodies and organs together with living things and objects from the natural world. These webs of interconnectivity were thought to be key to wellbeing and health. Produced at scale through metal engraving and woodblock printing, these natural history and compendia took on major importance as part of these educational resources (Kemp; Swan). In an effort to extend the reach of artefacts beyond their tangible presence, libraries globally have sought to create open access digital scans of historic medical and botanical illustrations. The images reconfigured in Silken Anatomies were downloaded from the Wellcome Trust’s online archive and have been reimagined through digital enhancement and sublimation dye techniques. Referencing shrouds, the yoryu silk panels enfold exhibition visitors, who were able to touch and pass through the silks, causing them to billow in response to human movement. We bring together an animal-made material (crafted by silkworms) with more-than-human images featuring both humans and other living creatures. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical images are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously, through this piece. We can both see and touch these more-than-human illustrations that speak to us of the early modern natural science visualisations that underpin contemporary digital images of the human body and the more-than-human world. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical plates are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously. The digital is returned to the tangible. Fig. 7: Detail from Talking/Flowers. Even in increasingly digitised healthcare environments, paper and other printed materials remain central documents in the landscape of health and wellbeing. Zines are small-scale, DIY, and typically handcrafted publications, which are often made to express creators’ thoughts and feelings about health and wellbeing (Lupton "Health Zines"; Watson and Bennett). Talking/Flowers (fig. 7), a zine of visual and textual work, explores the materialities of health information and healthcare encounters by creatively layering a diverse range of materials: clippings from MRI scans, digitally warped and recoloured images from medical infographics, and found poetry made from research publications. In this way, the zine remixes and reconstitutes key documents of authority in health institutions which continue to take primacy as evidence. While vital in the pipeline of diagnosis and treatment, such documents can become black boxes of meaning, and serve to distance health professionals from consumers and consumers from agentic understandings of their own health. These evidentiary materials are brought together here with other imagery, textures, and recollections of personal experience; the pages also feature leaves, flowers, fungi, and oceanic tones. Oceans, pools, rivers, lakes, and other coastal forms or waterways offer all-consuming sensory spaces in which people can find calm, balance, buoyancy, and connection with the wider world. Aqua tides, purple eddies, and misshapen pearls flow through the pages as the golden thread of the zine’s aesthetic theme. Also featured are three original poems. The first and third poems, ‘talking to a doctor’ and ‘talking to other people’, explore moments of relational vulnerability. The second poem, ‘untitled’, is a found poem made from the conclusions of sociologist Talcott Parsons’s 1975 article on the sick role reconsidered. In each of these poems, information and communication jar the encounters and more-than-human metaphors hold space for complex feelings. The cover similarly merges imagery from botanical and historical medical illustrations with a silver shell, evoking the morphological dimensions that connect the more-than-human. Exhibition visitors were able to turn the pages of the original copy of the zine, and were invited to take a printed copy away with them. Conclusion More-than-Human Wellbeing is an exhibition which aims to expand the horizons of how we understand wellbeing and our entanglements with the world. Our exhibition was designed to draw on our research into the more-than-human dimensions of health and wellbeing in the context of an increasingly digitised and datafied world. We wanted to attune visitors to the relational connections and multisensory ways of knowing that develop with and through people’s encounters and entanglements with creatures, things, and spaces. We sought to demonstrate that in this digital age, in which digital devices and software are often considered the most accurate and insightful ways to monitor and measure health and wellbeing, multisensory and affective engagements with elements of the natural environment remain crucial to understanding our bodies and health. Through engagements with our artworks, we hoped that new capacities for visitors’ learning and thinking about the relational and distributed dimensions of more-than-human wellbeing would be opened. While traditionally thought of as human-centered, we explore human health and wellbeing as interconnected with both the natural and technological. We used materials from the natural world – timber, paper materials, and silk fabric – in our artworks to capture both the multigenerational traces and entanglements between humans and plant matter. Recent works of natural and cultural history have drawn attention to the mysterious and important worlds of the fungi kingdom and its role in supporting and living symbiotically with other life on earth, including humans as well as plants (Sheldrake; Tsing). We also made sure to acknowledge this third kingdom of living things in our artworks. We combined these images and materials from nature with digitised modes of printing and fabrication to highlight the intersections of the digital with the non-digital in representations and sensory feelings of health and wellbeing. We disrupt and make strange signs of traditional human-centric medicine through reconfigurations, bricolage, and re-imaginations of more-than-human wellbeing. As humans we are interconnected with the natural world, and the signs of these meetings can be traced and read. Through our artistic creations, we hope to re-orient people towards this more open way of thinking about wellbeing. Working with arts practices and creative data visualisations, both digital and analogue, we bring to the fore the role that more-than-human agents play in mediating and making these convivial more-than-digital connections. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (CE200100005) and a Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture collaboration grant. UNSW Library provided financial and curatorial support for the mounting of the exhibition. References Abram, David. "Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking between the Body and the Breathing Earth." Planet. Volume 1. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Eds. Gavin van Horn et al. Center for Humans & Nature Press, 2021. 50-62. Baker, Stephanie Alice. Wellness Culture: How the Wellness Movement Has Been Used to Empower, Profit and Misinform. Emerald Group, 2022. Bawaka Country, et al. "Working with and Learning from Country: Decentring Human Author-Ity." cultural geographies 22.2 (2015): 269-283. DOI: 10.1177/1474474014539248. Braidotti, Rosi. "'We' Are in This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same." Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (2020): 465-469. DOI: 10.1007/s11673-020-10017-8. Chinn, Sarah E. Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence. Continuum, 2000. Endt-Jones, Marion. "Cultivating ‘Response-Ability’: Curating Coral in Recent Exhibitions." Journal of Curatorial Studies 9 (2020): 182-205. DOI: 10.1386/jcs_00020_1. Hartnell, Jack. Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages. Profile Books, 2018. Hernández, K.J., et al. "The Creatures Collective: Manifestings." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4.3 (2020): 838-863. DOI: 10.1177/2514848620938316. Howes, David. "Introduction to Sensory Museology." The Senses and Society 9.3 (2014): 259-267. DOI: 10.2752/174589314X14023847039917. Kemp, Martin. "Style and Non-Style in Anatomical Illustration: From Renaissance Humanism to Henry Gray." Journal of Anatomy 216.2 (2010): 192-208. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2009.01181.x. Kimmerer, Robin. "Restoration and Reciprocity: The Contributions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge." Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture. Eds. Dave Egan et al. Springer, 2011. 257-276. Lagay, Faith. "The Legacy of Humoral Medicine." AMA Journal of Ethics 4.7 (2002): 206-208. Lewis, Bradley. "Planetary Health Humanities—Responding to Covid Times." Journal of Medical Humanities 42.1 (2021): 3-16. DOI: 10.1007/s10912-020-09670-2. Lupton, Deborah. Covid Societies: Theorising the Coronavirus Crisis. Routledge, 2022. ———. Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives. Polity Press, 2019. ———. Digital Health: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 2017. ———. "Embodying Social Science Research – the Exhibition as a Form of Multi-Sensory Research Communication." LSE Impact of the Social Sciences, 2023. <https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/07/12/embodying-social-science-research-the-exhibition-as-a-form-of-multi-sensory-research-communication/>. ———. "From Human-Centric Digital Health to Digital One Health: Crucial New Directions for Mutual Flourishing." Digital Health 8 (2022). DOI: 10.1177/20552076221129103. ———. "Health Zines: Hand-Made and Heart-Felt." Routledge Handbook of Health and Media. Eds. Lester Friedman and Therese Jones. Routledge, 2022. 65-76. ———. The Internet of Animals: Human-Animals Relationships in the Digital Age. Polity Press, 2023. ———. "The More-than-Human Wellbeing Exhibition." <https://dlupton.com/>. ———. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Polity Press, 2016. Lupton, Deborah, et al. "Digitized and Datafied Embodiment: A More-than-Human Approach." Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Eds. Stefan Herbrechter et al. Springer International Publishing, 2022. 1-23. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1_65-1. Neimanis, Astrida, et al. "Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities: Toward Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene." Ethics & the Environment 20.1 (2015): 67-97. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 2002. Rots, Aike P. Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2020. Swan, Claudia. "Illustrated Natural History." Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Susan Dackerman. Harvard Art Museums, 2011. 186-191. Todd, Zoe. "An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism." Journal of Historical Sociology 29.1 (2016): 4-22. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015. Tynan, Lauren. "What Is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities with Kin." cultural geographies 28.4 (2021): 597-610. DOI: 10.1177/14744740211029287. Watson, Ash, and Andy Bennett. "The Felt Value of Reading Zines." American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9.2 (2021): 115-149. DOi: 10.1057/s41290-020-00108-9.

Introduction Let me start by telling you about my “first-world problem”: I study girls’ autobiographical practice in digital spaces but the conceptual tools in my field have been developed chiefly in order to read and analyse printed books. Girls’ digital engagements with self-representation—such as web comics and blogs—are fascinating texts and I want to know what they can tell us about how girls’ written selves connect in complex ways to broader cultural constructions of girlhood. The Greek roots of the word autobiography autos, bios, and graphe (self, life, writing) inform the kinds of approaches that have been taken to address the relationship between an autobiographical text and its author (Smith and Watson, Reading 1). Further, the understanding of autobiography as “self life writing” has shaped what kinds of texts get to be called autobiography and what texts are something else—identity work, media-making, or marginal textual practice. Fortunately, due to the proliferation of online activity that engages autobiographical modes of textual practice, life writing scholars are beginning to develop new tools in order to address these “texts”—blogs, tweets, status updates, avatars, and a variety of digital personas—to find out what they can tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate “real” life through media. One of these tools under construction is the idea of “automedia,” which I will elaborate on below. The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies—which P. David Marshall has described as “the proliferation of the public self”—has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities (Marshall 163). To the field of persona studies, this essay contributes an approach to the author website as a site of self-presentation that works to “package” an authorial persona for circulation within contemporary literary marketplaces. Significantly, I address these websites not as direct representations of a pre-existing self, but as automedial texts that need to be read and interpreted, and which work to construct the authorial self or persona. I draw on theories of authorship to propose the “author website” as a genre of automedial representation that creates authorial personas for public consumption. Specifically, I consider the website of Erika Moen—a young, female author working in the medium of autobiographical comics—as a case study in order to explore the tensions between Moen’s authorial self (as produced in the digital elements of erikamoen.com) and the other, more deliberately autobiographical, renderings of her self that appear in her comics. Although young cartoonists tend to position themselves as artists rather than authors, the recent academic and critical interest in the “graphic novel” form has resulted in a growing sense of these works as literary and their makers as authors. In thinking through this distinction, Andrew Bennett’s suggestion that “asking ‘what is an author?’ is intimately related to the question ‘what is literature?’” (118) points to why cartoonists, whose texts are part image and part text and only sometimes bound up as books, have not always been contextualised as authors. Contemporary Authors and the Impetus to “Connect” To have an identity as an author is distinct from being an author. It is one thing to sit at a desk doing the work of writing a book. Making oneself visible as an author is a very different kind of work. Writers are asked to present themselves as authors in a range of contexts such as writers’ festivals, readings, book signings, interviews and book promotion tours, and this demand has increased with the rise of social media: writers are now expected to represent themselves across a variety of digital platforms, which currently include Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. These events and spaces reflect changing reading practices in which readers wish to move beyond the “solitary act of reading” and to participate in literary communities (Johanson and Freeman, 304). Within these communities authors occupy a role that is part celebrity, part guru, and part (imagined) close friend. Johanson and Freeman, in considering the appeal of writers’ festivals, argue “audiences seek genuine relationships with artists […] and are sensitive to a lack of authenticity on the part of the artist in the relationship” (306). Readers want to have access to authors: to get near them, the real them. And this sets up the expectation of a two-way street in which there is pressure on authors to also be participants and to grant readers the access they desire. Author websites are one way that writers respond to the call to make themselves visible and accessible as authors within literary communities, and this call is often framed as an impetus to “connect with” an audience. But the primary function of the author website is to exploit readers’ fascination with the author in order to sell books. In neoliberal cultures the pressure is on for all kinds of people to use online tools and spaces to commoditise their self-representation by cultivating a “self-brand,” and, to varying degrees of alarm, disgust, or pragmatism, this is certainly one way that the author is conceptualised: as a brand name (See Australian Society of Authors; Evers; Force; and Rankin). The author as brand name guarantees and markets a reading experience particular to that brand. As with many other commodities, author brands are a mechanism for organising books into categories with identifiable traits in order that readers/consumers may identify which books appeal to their reading tastes and choose their purchases accordingly. It is as Michel Foucault remarks in answer to the question “What is an Author?”: it is “a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses” (159). Digital spaces in particular are seen as opportunities for authors to create an “online presence” by communicating themselves as a brand on a website. I am proposing that we might look at how these websites draw on intimate modes of self-representation to create an author-subject that is knowable to a reading public, and to think about how the features of these sites and their digital contexts shape the kinds of authorial personas that can be produced in the medium of the author website. In order to do this, I now want to turn to the field of auto/biography studies in which there is a growing body of work that considers a range of online modes of self-representation as texts that can be read, analysed and understood within a broader framework of auto/biographical practices (autobiography is sometimes written with a slash, as in, auto/biography in order to acknowledge both biography and autobiography within a range of textual practices that broadly deal with life narrative). It is worth mentioning here that there is much diversity within author websites, and not all of them work to facilitate a connection with the reader. In fact, some work conversely to distance the author or to shroud them in mystery, among a range of other functions and formats. These sites of resistance to the pressure to “connect” are just as interesting in the context of finding out how online spaces are used to construct authors, however, there is not room to explore them here. The Author Website: An Automedial Genre In order to address new forms of (chiefly digital) self-representation that go beyond the printed book, scholars working in the field of auto/biography studies have proposed the concept of “automedia” as an alternative to terms such as autobiography, life writing or life narrative. Leading memoir and life narrative theorist Julie Rak (2013) argues that the concept of autobiography—and the ways that scholars have approached the genre—has been dominated by ideas of “narrative” and “writing” that are ill-suited to reading and analysing many online modes of self-representation. For example, although we might have trouble trying to read a Facebook wall or a Second Life avatar as “an autobiography” in the traditional sense, these performances of self-identity demonstrate ways in which users are taking up technology in order to engage in the business of autobiographical representation. And they are interesting for what they might be able to tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to “live” a “life.” Rak proposes that these texts, which move beyond the medium of the written word, and which are not necessarily crafted (or read) as a story or narrative, might be studied not as autobiography but instead as automedia. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson also point to automedia as a way of approaching autobiographical texts in a way that emphasizes how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told about it. They state that “media cannot simply be conceptualized as “tools” for presenting a preexisting, essential self. … Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (“Virtually Me” 77). So we might understand an automedial approach as a way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation. In my conceptualisation, this approach understands that the self does not exist outside of mediation, and it seeks to comprehend how the processes of (auto-)mediation shape selfhood both in individual terms (by analysing a particular automedial text to understand how it constructs the specific subject of that text) and in more general terms (how conventions and practices of different kinds of media shape and reflect cultural ideas of the self). As such, I do not think that automedia as an approach to autobiographical texts need be limited to digital media—after all, books are still media. But the modes of self-representation being taken up in online contexts present scholars with urgent questions about what it means to represent life and the self in increasingly social, networked, multi-media ways. The author website is an increasingly valuable tool for making writers visible as authors in online environments; but how are they automedial? By creating a mediated construction of an authorial persona that functions as a space in which readers (or to be more inclusive, internet users) can move around and experience the author’s mediated persona, the author website draws on strategies of auto/biographical representation in order to respond to a demand for personal access to the author. The author website works to create an often interactive space of contact between the writer as author and the public, where an audience (or internet user) is able to explore the author as he or she is constructed by his or her website. In order to explore how this kind of analysis might begin, I will turn to comics artist Erika Moen and her website erikamoen.com. Case Study: Erika Moen’s Authorial Persona Erika Moen is a self-published comics author based in the US. Her online diary comic DAR!: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary (2003-2009) grew out of her printed mini comics about coming out as lesbian. Moen’s website erikamoen.com is a good example of a highly developed automedial space, and it works to construct her as a comics author by offering for public consumption an authorial persona that functions as a brand, packaging and marketing her work. This case study is compelling for two reasons. Firstly, the graphic medium that Moen works in is particularly suited to the current moment in Web 2.0 history in which images—often in conjunction with words—are increasingly central. Secondly, the autobiographical nature of her work makes for interesting tensions between the authorial persona that is represented on her website and the autobiographical subject of her comics. For autobiographical authors, the call for them to be accessible to the public takes on an extra dimension. A consistent author brand should maintain an alignment between the kind of work they produce and their persona. In the case of autobiographical writers, their persona is anchored in a textual representation of their real-life self, so this allows us to think about the different functions of these two constructions, and the ways they speak to each other (or don’t). Moen is credited with generating the content of the site; however, her website was designed by a web designer and is based on a blog format. Although Moen’s site is much more than a blog, the blog format is evident as an influence on the design of the site which comprises nine pages: “Home,” “Art Portfolio,” “Comics,” “About,” “Events and Appearances,” “Press,” “Blog,” “Shop,” and “Contact.” In a broader consideration of this kind of author website, the four pages Home, About, Shop, and Contact, represent the key functions that these sites perform. The home page grounds the site, giving the user a first impression and overview of the author brand. “About” is the place that users can find biographical information. The site’s shop indicates the context of the space as a site that occurs within commercial networks of production and consumption, and which also works to disguise the commoditisation of the author by delineating a separate space for commerce that focuses on their work as the object for sale. The “Contact” page provides further channels for “connecting” with the author. The focus of this essay is Moen’s “Home” page (Figure 1). The home page anchors the site and works to create a professional persona for Moen that draws heavily on her autobiographical voice and cartoon style (which she has honed in her works DAR! and Oh Joy Sex Toy). It is highly significant that the face that welcomes the user to the site is not a photographic image of Moen but rather her cartoon avatar, which greets users with an assured and friendly smile. Those familiar with her work will recognise this picture as Moen. If readers fail to make this connection, there are clickable headings immediately to the right of the figure that use the first-person voice: the headings invite the user to “check out my work” and ask them “what am I up to?” (my emphasis). Taking a cue from the comic medium, the user might associate the proximity of the image of the cartoon girl to these statements, and read the two elements cohesively like a comics panel, understanding that the girl is the speaker, and the speaker is the author Erika Moen. Moen, as the author constructed by the website, almost always addresses the reader in this chatty, informal voice which echoes the voice she uses in her comics. On the home page, the reader is asked several questions and all of these appear in close proximity to the drawing of Moen. In addition to the one mentioned above, the reader is asked if they are “Looking to purchase some art?” and whether they “Want to see what I’ve created?” Instead of using labels here, the website uses questions addressed to the reader, and these appear clustered around the cartoon image of Moen which is rendered in her style. These questions draw the reader into an implied conversation, and they also suggest a presence or speaker behind the screen which, prompted by the cartoon Erika, the reader is encouraged to imagine as Erika Moen. This illusion of two-way communication invites the reader to experience the site as a personal encounter, and Moen’s perky, friendly voice that speaks intimately to her readers about her latest activities, products and appearances is the thread that sews together the different spaces of the site as well as Moen’s published work. Above the drawn image of Moen appear the words “Erika Moen” in a large “handwritten” font that dominates the screen. The illusion of handwriting here is significant. Hilary Chute, a scholar of autobiographical comics, in her book Graphic Women argues that handwriting constitutes an important autobiographical act on the part of the comic memoirist. She states that handwriting “underscores the subjective personality of the author” and acts as “a trace of autobiography in the mark of its maker” (10-11). Indeed, handwriting is often read as a sign of humanity and authenticity that is understood in opposition to the machined construction of computer generated fonts. The idea that handwriting can be traced back to an individual and that personal traits can be discovered by decoding a person’s handwriting are ideas that reflect an autobiographical reading of handwriting and its place within textual culture. In this context, on the website of a comics artist, in addition to referencing the medium of cartoons, it also signals these ideas about authenticity and autobiography, and it implies the human behind the digital text. Everything on the home page is a product of Moen herself and each element communicates her persona as an indie, DIY, self-published cartoonist: each image that appears on the home page is drawn by her hand; her voice inflects the majority of the text on the page; some of the writing appears in a handwritten font; even, the bio states, her degree from Pitzer College is “self-made.” Moen’s Home page is an automedial space that facilitates a connection between author and reader that is grounded in the commoditised networks of persona production and consumption: the site serves not only to encourage the reader to buy Moen’s autobiographical comics, but effectively to “buy into” her personal brand. It constructs a persona that draws on a combination of visual and textual signals which at once connect Moen to her comics works and also encourage readers to feel as if they “know” Erika: her name in handwriting, her comics portrait which welcomes the reader, and the subheadings that draw the reader into a conversation. Although there is much more to explore on Moen’s website, in order to demonstrate some key considerations of an automedial approach I have examined several significant elements of the homepage which form the basis for a fuller reading of the site. Conclusion This essay sits at the burgeoning intersection of autobiography studies and digital media studies, and is part of an attempt to understand how digital media practices impact on what kinds of self-representation are produced and consumed. In this way, it contributes to the field of persona studies, which is also invested in exploring systems that facilitate the “presentation of the self that are now ubiquitous in contemporary culture” (Barbour & Marshall). I have suggested that the author website can be read as a genre of automedia in order to explore how these digital spaces—which are embedded in networks of literary production and consumption—draw on auto/biographical strategies to construct an authorial persona that works to sell books by connecting with an audience. This essay works towards further research on paratextual sites that can tell us more about how writers are constructed as authors in the contemporary literary landscape, and I have proposed that a consideration of the deployment and construction of authorial personas is integral to understanding “the author” in this cultural moment. References Anderson, Hephzibah. “How Authors Become Mega-Brands.” BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation. 19 Feb. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014. Australian Society of Authors. “Marketing: The Author as Brand Name.” DVD. Australian Society of Authors, n.d. 15 Apr. 2014. Barbour, Kim, and David Marshall. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 19 May 2014. Bennett, Andrew. The Author. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Chute, Hilary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Evers, Stuart. “Bestselling Authors, or Branding Machines?” The Guardian 12 June 2008. 15 Apr. 2014. Force, Marie. “A Finger on the Pulse of Readers – New Survey Confirms Reader Passion for e-Books, But Half Still Want Paperbacks.” PR Newswire 1 Aug. 2013. 14 Apr. 2014. Johanson, Katya, and Robin Freeman. “The Reader as Audience: The Appeal of the Writers’ Festival to the Contemporary Audience.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26.2 (2012): 303-314. Marshall, P David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170. Moen, Erika. DAR!: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary. 2003-2009. 10 Apr. 2014. Moen, Erika. Erika Moen. c. 2014. 22 Apr. 2014. Moen, Erika. Oh Joy Sex Toy. 2011-2014. 10 Apr. 2014. Pitsaki, Irini. “Strategic Brand Management Tools in Publishing.” The International Journal of the Book 8.3 (2008): 103-112. Rak, Julie. “First Person? Life Writing versus Automedia.” Beyond the Subject: New Developments in Life Writing: IABA Europe 2013. 31 Oct. - 3 Nov. 2013. Rankin, Jennifer. “Publish and Be Branded: The New Threat to Literature’s Laboratory.” The Guardian 14 Jan. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 70-95.

Cultural sociologists (Bourdieu; DiMaggio, “Cultural Capital”, “Classification”; Gans; Lamont & Foumier; Halle; Erickson) wrote about high culture and popular culture in an attempt to explain the growing social and economic inequalities, to find consensus on culture hierarchies, and to analyze cultural complexities. Halle states that this categorisation of culture into “high culture” and “popular culture” underlined most of the debate on culture in the last fifty years. Gans contends that both high culture and popular culture are stereotypes, public forms of culture or taste cultures, each sharing “common aesthetic values and standards of tastes” (8). However, this article is not concerned with these categorisations, or macro analysis. Rather, it is a reflection piece that inquires if opera, which is usually considered high culture, has become more equal to popular culture, and why some directors change the time and place of opera plots, whereas others will stay true to the original setting of the story. I do not consider these productions “adaptations,” but “post-modern morphologies,” and I will refer to this later in the paper. In other words, the paper is seeking to explain a social phenomenon and explore the underlying motives by quoting interviews with directors. The word ‘opera’ is defined in Elson’s Music Dictionary as: “a form of musical composition evolved shortly before 1600, by some enthusiastic Florentine amateurs who sought to bring back the Greek plays to the modern stage” (189). Hence, it was an experimentation to revive Greek music and drama believed to be the ideal way to express emotions (Grout 186). It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when stage directors started changing the time and place of the original settings of operas. The practice became more common after World War II, and Peter Brook’s Covent Garden productions of Boris Godunov (1948) and Salome (1949) are considered the prototypes of this practice (Sutcliffe 19-20). Richard Wagner’s grandsons, the brothers Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner are cited in the music literature as using technology and modern innovations in staging and design beginning in the early 1950s. Brief Background into the History of Opera Grout contends that opera began as an attempt to heighten the dramatic expression of language by intensifying the natural accents of speech through melody supported by simple harmony. In the late 1590s, the Italian composer Jacopo Peri wrote what is considered to be the first opera, but most of it has been lost. The first surviving complete opera is Euridice, a version of the Orpheus myth that Peri and Giulio Caccini jointly set to music in 1600. The first composer to understand the possibilities inherent in this new musical form was Claudio Monteverdi, who in 1607 wrote Orfeo. Although it was based on the same story as Euridice, it was expanded to a full five acts. Early opera was meant for small, private audiences, usually at court; hence it began as an elitist genre. After thirty years of being private, in 1637, opera went public with the opening of the first public opera house, Teatro di San Cassiano, in Venice, and the genre quickly became popular. Indeed, Monteverdi wrote his last two operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea for the Venetian public, thereby leading the transition from the Italian courts to the ‘public’. Both operas are still performed today. Poppea was the first opera to be based on a historical rather than a mythological or allegorical subject. Sutcliffe argues that opera became popular because it was a new mixture of means: new words, new music, new methods of performance. He states, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (65). By the end of the 17th century, Venice alone had ten opera houses that had produced more than 350 operas. Wealthy families purchased season boxes, but inexpensive tickets made the genre available to persons of lesser means. The genre spread quickly, and various styles of opera developed. In Naples, for example, music rather than the libretto dominated opera. The genre spread to Germany and France, each developing the genre to suit the demands of its audiences. For example, ballet became an essential component of French opera. Eventually, “opera became the profligate art as large casts and lavish settings made it the most expensive public entertainment. It was the only art that without embarrassment called itself ‘grand’” (Boorstin 467). Contemporary Opera Productions Opera continues to be popular. According to a 2002 report released by the National Endowment for the Arts, 6.6 million adults attended at least one live opera performance in 2002, and 37.6 million experienced opera on television, video, radio, audio recording or via the Internet. Some think that it is a dying art form, while others think to the contrary, that it is a living art form because of its complexity and “ability to probe deeper into the human experience than any other art form” (Berger 3). Some directors change the setting of operas with perhaps the most famous contemporary proponent of this approach being Peter Sellars, who made drastic changes to three of Mozart’s most famous operas. Le Nozze di Figaro, originally set in 18th-century Seville, was set by Sellars in a luxury apartment in the Trump Tower in New York City; Sellars set Don Giovanni in contemporary Spanish Harlem rather than 17th century Seville; and for Cosi Fan Tutte, Sellars chose a diner on Cape Cod rather than 18th century Naples. As one of the more than six million Americans who attend live opera each year, I have experienced several updated productions, which made me reflect on the convergence or cross-over between high culture and popular culture. In 2000, I attended a production of Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in Prague, the very theatre where Mozart conducted the world premiere in 1787. In this production, Don Giovanni was a fashion designer known as “Don G” and drove a BMW. During the 1999-2000 season, Los Angeles Opera engaged film director Bruce Beresford to direct Verdi’s Rigoletto. Beresford updated the original setting of 16th century Mantua to 20th century Hollywood. The lead tenor, rather than being the Duke of Mantua, was a Hollywood agent known as “Duke Mantua.” In the first act, just before Marullo announces to the Duke’s guests that the jester Rigoletto has taken a mistress, he gets the news via his cell phone. Director Ian Judge set the 2004 production of Le Nozze di Figaro in the 1950s. In one of the opening productions of the 2006-07 LA opera season, Vincent Patterson also chose the 1950s for Massenet’s Manon rather than France in the 1720s. This allowed the title character to appear in the fourth act dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Excerpts from the dress rehearsal can be seen on YouTube. Most recently, I attended a production of Ariane et Barbe-Bleu at the Paris Opera. The original setting of the Maeterlinck play is in Duke Bluebeard’s castle, but the time period is unclear. However, it is doubtful that the 1907 opera based on an 1899 play was meant to be set in what appeared to be a mental institution equipped with surveillance cameras whose screens were visible to the audience. The critical and audience consensus seemed to be that the opera was a musical success but a failure as a production. James Shore summed up the audience reaction: “the production team was vociferously booed and jeered by much of the house, and the enthusiastic applause that had greeted the singers and conductor, immediately went nearly silent when they came on stage”. It seems to me that a new class-related taste has emerged; the opera genre has shot out a subdivision which I shall call “post-modern morphologies,” that may appeal to a larger pool of people. Hence, class, age, gender, and race are becoming more important factors in conceptualising opera productions today than in the past. I do not consider these productions as new adaptations because the libretto and the music are originals. What changes is the fact that both text and sound are taken to a higher dimension by adding iconographic images that stimulate people’s brains. When asked in an interview why he often changes the setting of an opera, Ian Judge commented, “I try to find the best world for the story and characters to operate in, and I think you have to find a balance between the period the author set it in, the period he conceived it in and the nature of theatre and audiences at that time, and the world we live in.” Hence, the world today is complex, interconnected, borderless and timeless because of advanced technologies, and updated opera productions play with symbols that offer multiple meanings that reflect the world we live in. It may be that television and film have influenced opera production. Character tenor Graham Clark recently observed in an interview, “Now the situation has changed enormously. Television and film have made a lot of things totally accessible which they were not before and in an entirely different perception.” Director Ian Judge believes that television and film have affected audience expectations in opera. “I think audiences who are brought up on television, which is bad acting, and movies, which is not that good acting, perhaps require more of opera than stand and deliver, and I have never really been happy with someone who just stands and sings.” Sociologist Wendy Griswold states that culture reflects social reality and the meaning of a particular cultural object (such as opera), originates “in the social structures and social patterns it reflects” (22). Screens of various technologies are embedded in our lives and normalised as extensions of our bodies. In those opera productions in which directors change the time and place of opera plots, use technology, and are less concerned with what the composer or librettist intended (which we can only guess), the iconographic images create multi valances, textuality similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of multiplicity of voices. Hence, a plurality of meanings. Plàcido Domingo, the Eli and Edyth Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera, seeks to take advantage of the company’s proximity to the film industry. This is evidenced by his having engaged Bruce Beresford to direct Rigoletto and William Friedkin to direct Ariadne auf Naxos, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Gianni Schicchi. Perhaps the most daring example of Domingo’s approach was convincing Garry Marshall, creator of the television sitcom Happy Days and who directed the films Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries, to direct Jacques Offenbach’s The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein to open the company’s 20th anniversary season. When asked how Domingo convinced him to direct an opera for the first time, Marshall responded, “he was insistent that one, people think that opera is pretty elitist, and he knew without insulting me that I was not one of the elitists; two, he said that you gotta make a funny opera; we need more comedy in the operetta and opera world.” Marshall rewrote most of the dialogue and performed it in English, but left the “songs” untouched and in the original French. He also developed numerous sight gags and added characters including a dog named Morrie and the composer Jacques Offenbach himself. Did it work? Christie Grimstad wrote, “if you want an evening filled with witty music, kaleidoscopic colors and hilariously good singing, seek out The Grand Duchess. You will not be disappointed.” The FanFaire Website commented on Domingo’s approach of using television and film directors to direct opera: You’ve got to hand it to Plàcido Domingo for having the vision to draw on Hollywood’s vast pool of directorial talent. Certainly something can be gained from the cross-fertilization that could ensue from this sort of interaction between opera and the movies, two forms of entertainment (elitist and perennially struggling for funds vs. popular and, it seems, eternally rich) that in Los Angeles have traditionally lived separate lives on opposite sides of the tracks. A wider audience, for example, never a problem for the movies, can only mean good news for the future of opera. So, did the Marshall Plan work? Purists of course will always want their operas and operettas ‘pure and unadulterated’. But with an audience that seemed to have as much fun as the stellar cast on stage, it sure did. Critic Alan Rich disagrees, calling Marshall “a representative from an alien industry taking on an artistic product, not to create something innovative and interesting, but merely to insult.” Nevertheless, the combination of Hollywood and opera seems to work. The Los Angeles Opera reported that the 2005-2006 season was its best ever: “ticket revenues from the season, which ended in June, exceeded projected figures by nearly US$900,000. Seasonal attendance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stood at more than 86% of the house’s capacity, the largest percentage in the opera’s history.” Domingo continues with the Hollywood connection in the upcoming 2008-2009 season. He has reengaged William Friedkin to direct two of Puccini’s three operas titled collectively as Il Trittico. Friedkin will direct the two tragedies, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica. Although Friedkin has already directed a production of the third opera in Il Trittico for Los Angeles, the comedy Gianni Schicchi, Domingo convinced Woody Allen to make his operatic directorial debut with this work. This can be viewed as another example of the desire to make opera and popular culture more equal. However, some, like Alan Rich, may see this attempt as merely insulting rather than interesting and innovative. With a top ticket price in Los Angeles of US$238 per seat, opera seems to continue to be elitist. Berger (2005) concurs with this idea and gives his rationale for elitism: there are rich people who support and attend the opera; it is an imported art from Europe that causes some marginalisation; opera is not associated with something being ‘moral,’ a concept engrained in American culture; it is expensive to produce and usually funded by kings, corporations, rich people; and the opera singers are rare –usually one in a million who will have the vocal quality to sing opera arias. Furthermore, Nicholas Kenyon commented in the early 1990s: “there is suspicion that audiences are now paying more and more money for their seats to see more and more money spent on stage” (Kenyon 3). Still, Garry Marshall commented that the budget for The Grand Duchess was US$2 million, while his budget for Runaway Bride was US$72 million. Kenyon warns, “Such popularity for opera may be illusory. The enjoyment of one striking aria does not guarantee the survival of an art form long regarded as over-elitist, over-recondite, and over-priced” (Kenyon 3). A recent development is the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to simulcast live opera performances from the Met stage to various cinemas around the world. These HD transmissions began with the 2006-2007 season when six performances were broadcast. In the 2007-2008 season, the schedule has expanded to eight live Saturday matinee broadcasts plus eight recorded encores broadcast the following day. According to The Los Angeles Times, “the Met’s experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form” (Aslup). Whether or not this is a “new art form,” it certainly makes world-class live opera available to countless persons who cannot travel to New York and pay the price for tickets, when they are available. In the US alone, more than 350 cinemas screen these live HD broadcasts from the Met. Top ticket price for these performances at the Met is US$375, while the lowest price is US$27 for seats with only a partial view. Top price for the HD transmissions in participating cinemas is US$22. This experiment with live simulcasts makes opera more affordable and may increase its popularity; combined with updated stagings, opera can engage a much larger audience and hope for even a mass consumption. Is opera moving closer and closer to popular culture? There still seems to be an aura of elitism and snobbery about opera. However, Plàcido Domingo’s attempt to join opera with Hollywood is meant to break the barriers between high and popular culture. The practice of updating opera settings is not confined to Los Angeles. As mentioned earlier, the idea can be traced to post World War II England, and is quite common in Europe. Examples include Erich Wonder’s approach to Wagner’s Ring, making Valhalla, the mythological home of the gods and typically a mountaintop, into the spaceship Valhalla, as well as my own experience with Don Giovanni in Prague and Ariane et Barbe-Bleu in Paris. Indeed, Sutcliffe maintains, “Great classics in all branches of the arts are repeatedly being repackaged for a consumerist world that is increasingly and neurotically self-obsessed” (61). Although new operas are being written and performed, most contemporary performances are of operas by Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini (www.operabase.com). This means that audiences see the same works repeated many times, but in different interpretations. Perhaps this is why Sutcliffe contends, “since the 1970s it is the actual productions that have had the novelty value grabbed by the headlines. Singing no longer predominates” (Sutcliffe 57). If then, as Sutcliffe argues, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (Sutcliffe 65), then the contemporary practice of changing the original settings is simply the latest “new formula” that is replacing the old ones. If there are no new words or new music, then what remains are new methods of performance, hence the practice of changing time and place. Opera is a complex art form that has evolved over the past 400 years and continues to evolve, but will it survive? The underlining motives for directors changing the time and place of opera performances are at least three: for aesthetic/artistic purposes, financial purposes, and to reach an audience from many cultures, who speak different languages, and who have varied tastes. These three reasons are interrelated. In 1996, Sutcliffe wrote that there has been one constant in all the arguments about opera productions during the preceding two decades: “the producer’s wish to relate the works being staged to contemporary circumstances and passions.” Although that sounds like a purely aesthetic reason, making opera relevant to new, multicultural audiences and thereby increasing the bottom line seems very much a part of that aesthetic. It is as true today as it was when Sutcliffe made the observation twelve years ago (60-61). My own speculation is that opera needs to attract various audiences, and it can only do so by appealing to popular culture and engaging new forms of media and technology. Erickson concludes that the number of upper status people who are exclusively faithful to fine arts is declining; high status people consume a variety of culture while the lower status people are limited to what they like. Research in North America, Europe, and Australia, states Erickson, attest to these trends. My answer to the question can stage directors make opera and popular culture “equal” is yes, and they can do it successfully. Perhaps Stanley Sharpless summed it up best: After his Eden triumph, When the Devil played his ace, He wondered what he could do next To irk the human race, So he invented Opera, With many a fiendish grin, To mystify the lowbrows, And take the highbrows in. References The Grand Duchess. 2005. 3 Feb. 2008 < http://www.ffaire.com/Duchess/index.htm >.Aslup, Glenn. “Puccini’s La Boheme: A Live HD Broadcast from the Met.” Central City Blog Opera 7 Apr. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.centralcityopera.org/blog/2008/04/07/puccini%E2%80%99s- la-boheme-a-live-hd-broadcast-from-the-met/ >.Berger, William. Puccini without Excuses. New York: Vintage, 2005.Boorstin, Daniel. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.Clark, Graham. “Interview with Graham Clark.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 11 Aug. 2006.DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Capital and School Success.” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189-201.DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.”_ American Sociological Review_ 52 (1987): 440-55.Elson, C. Louis. “Opera.” Elson’s Music Dictionary. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1905.Erickson, H. Bonnie. “The Crisis in Culture and Inequality.” In W. Ivey and S. J. Tepper, eds. Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life. New York: Routledge, 2007.Fanfaire.com. “At Its 20th Anniversary Celebration, the Los Angeles Opera Had a Ball with The Grand Duchess.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fanfaire.com/Duchess/index.htm >.Gans, J. Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1977.Grimstad, Christie. Concerto Net.com. 2005. 12 Jan. 2008 < http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=3091 >.Grisworld, Wendy. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994.Grout, D. Jay. A History of Western Music. Shorter ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1964.Halle, David. “High and Low Culture.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. London: Blackwell, 2006.Judge, Ian. “Interview with Ian Judge.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 22 Mar. 2006.Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001. 19 Nov. 2006 < http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=opera&searchmode=none >.Kenyon, Nicholas. “Introduction.” In A. Holden, N. Kenyon and S. Walsh, eds. The Viking Opera Guide. New York: Penguin, 1993.Lamont, Michele, and Marcel Fournier. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Lord, M.G. “Shlemiel! Shlemozzle! And Cue the Soprano.” The New York Times 4 Sep. 2005.Los Angeles Opera. “LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo Announces Results of Record-Breaking 20th Anniversary Season.” News release. 2006.Marshall, Garry. “Interview with Garry Marshall.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 31 Aug. 2005.National Endowment for the Arts. 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Research Division Report #45. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.nea.gov/pub/NEASurvey2004.pdf >.NCM Fanthom. “The Metropolitan Opera HD Live.” 2 Feb. 2008 < http://fathomevents.com/details.aspx?seriesid=622&gclid= CLa59NGuspECFQU6awodjiOafA >.Opera Today. James Sobre: Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Capriccio in Paris – Name This Stage Piece If You Can. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Rich, Alan. “High Notes, and Low.” LA Weekly 15 Sep. 2005. 6 May 2008 < http://www.laweekly.com/stage/a-lot-of-night-music/high-notes-and-low/8160/ >.Sharpless, Stanley. “A Song against Opera.” In E. O. Parrott, ed. How to Be Tremendously Tuned in to Opera. New York: Penguin, 1990.Shore, James. Opera Today. 2007. 4 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Sutcliffe, Tom. Believing in Opera. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996.YouTube. “Manon Sex and the Opera.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiBQhr2Sy0k >.

As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Murdoch: School of Information Technology, 2006. 275-84. <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf>.Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence. Ed. Keith Hoeller. Pittsburgh: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986. 31-78.———. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1991.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered State of Conscious­ness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011.Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423.States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch. ABC and Showtime. 1990-3 & 2017. Wamsley, Erin. “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 14.3 (2014): 433. “Y2K Bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 18 July 2018. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug>.

Being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only world: the “true world” is just a lie added on to it… —Nietzsche. Anna Poletti: I’m attracted to autobiography in a non-narrative context because I’m very interested in texts that people create that demonstrate their thinking or their fantasies or their processing, generally.Lauren Berlant: Right, in that sense it’s autobiography in your larger sense of what autobiography is: a record of […] processing. —Anna Poletti and Julie Rak with Lauren Berlant. The medium is the message. —Marshall McLuhanWelcome to the M/C Journal issue on automediality. If “automediality” sounds like another academic buzzword to you, you are right. But it is more than a buzzword for scholars interested in exploring the significant role of mediation in auto/biographical engagement. Automediality is, we think, an incredibly useful way of framing and grouping scholarly investigations of the processes and practices that people engage when they mediate their lives and selves in a range of auto/biographical forms.We are incredibly excited to bring you this vibrant collection of research about what we are calling “automediality,” but first it is useful to lay some groundwork in terms of explicitly articulating what we think automediality is and does, and why we think it is necessary.As life writing scholars exploring contemporary examples of digital auto/biography in our own research, we were both struck by the need for a new definition of auto/biography that expands beyond text, beyond narrative, beyond subject in any complete sense or form, to reflect the multiplicity of ways that lives are lived and recorded using new media today. We each found ourselves limited, at times, by existing assumptions about what auto/biography traditionally is. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their field defining work Reading Autobiography, offer an etymological cue that summarises the prevailing use and perception of autobiographical work: “in Greek, autos denotes ‘self,’ bios ‘life,’ and graphe ‘writing.’ Taken together in this order, the words self life writing offer a brief definition of the autobiography” (1).If “autobiography” has denoted a way to write the self from the location of the self, automediality points to the range of media forms and technologies through which people engage in digital, visual, filmic, performative, textual, and transmediated forms of documenting, constructing and presenting the self. Smith and Watson introduce automediality as a possible theoretical framework for “approaching life storytelling in diverse visual and digital media” (Reading 168). Originally developed by European scholars such as Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser, the term was introduced in order “to expand the definition of how subjectivity is constructed in writing, image, or new media” (Smith and Watson Reading 168).Conjoining autos and media, the concept redresses a tendency in autobiography studies to consider media as “tools” for rendering a pre-existent self. Theorists of automediality emphasize that the choice of medium is determined by self-expression; and the materiality of the medium is constitutive of the subjectivity rendered. Thus media technologies do not simplify or undermine the interiority of the subject but, on the contrary, expand the field of self-representation beyond the literary to cultural and media practices. New media of the self revise notions of identity and the rhetoric and modalities of self-presentation, and they prompt new imaginings of virtual sociality enabled by concepts of community that do not depend on personal encounter. (Reading 168)Looking at auto/biographical practices from a framework of automediality moves away from a conception of texts as able to capture and transmit preexisting selves, lives and identities, and towards an understanding of selves, lives and identities as constructed by and through textual and media practices. It is through creating an autobiographical text that the “self” a person thinks they are comes into being. The mode of creation here, be it a Facebook status update, a memoir, or an alt account, for example, is situated within networks of power, meaning and social capital to shape ways of being a “self” in a particular environment or context. Automedial reading takes all of these formative elements into consideration.Julie Rak suggests that automedia “describes the enactment of a life story in a new media environment” (155), but we think that the term is even more useful as a framework or approach to studying not only new media life stories, but auto/biographical practices as they are enacted in a range of media forms, analogue and digital alike. Importantly, our aim here is not simply to introduce another buzzword, but rather to draw attention to the current need to rethink the significant role of mediation in auto/biographical production, performance, and practices. As Rak points out, “it is time not only to rename the practices we study, but also to think critically about online life as life, and not as the texts many of us are more used to studying, which are meant to represent a life” (156). This kind of critical rethinking about how media is embedded in the living of lives, and the scholarly shift that Rak suggests from examining representation in texts to examining “online life as life” is crucial to the notion of automediality. And it has us—the editors of this issue—divided. A Conversation between EditorsÜmit: choosing “subject” and “process” over “text.”I think what automediality is, which is different to auto/biography, is process rather than product. Automediality allows us to explore how our lives intertwine with different mediums and technologies resulting in new subjects, but subjects in motion. There is no product, there is no complete narrative, there is no snapshot that captures the subject. The subject is always developing, always in motion, always in the “process of doing” (Rak 156), of being and becoming. It is a “moving target” as Smith and Watson suggest (“Virtually” 71). And therefore, automediality, as Rak suggests, is the process of living: living in relationship with media. Where as an autobiographical enquiry has usually (not always) involved the study of a subject in a complete form (although susceptible to other “versions”)—a text in other words, which can be examined by itself—an automedial enquiry has to adapt to the fact that there isn’t a product that can be examined in isolation. As Emma has argued elsewhere, we can never hold “a single cohesive version” of automedial subjects in our hands and we never reach “the end” of a subject’s self-representation as long as they continue to “post” (“Self-Branding” 75). What we are exploring as scholars of automediality is a process of living. How people live, create and present themselves, participate, narrativise, and simply “be” in different spaces, using different mediums and technologies. The mediated lives and subjects that we’re exploring in this issue require new language, new words and definitions. We are not dealing with “texts,” although there are textual components, we are not dealing with “narratives,” although one (or many) is (or are) always in formation (see Rak 156), and most importantly, we are not dealing with “products,” that hold any significance in isolation. What we are dealing with are processes: processes of being, doing, creating, and distributing the self, in relationship with media and their affordances, limitations and participants. My objection to language such as “text” is that it implies something tangible, taking for granted the ephemerality of the subjects of automediality. So often in my research I have taken a “snapshot” of a subject (in the form of a YouTube video, for example) and treated it like a text ready for analysis only to find when I revisit it that it has changed, been edited or contradicted, or completely erased (see Kennedy). And when we treat “snapshots” as “texts” for analysis I think we miss the most important point: that is the process through which the subject was and is being formed (in relationship with the medium, its technologies, and the people and things that congregate and participate in that space). We need to expand the way we explore mediated subjects and lives and “automediality” allows us to do this—it gives us a “space” in which to develop new language and methods of enquiry.Emma: texts are vital to studying automediality.Elsewhere, I have suggested that textuality is key to a definition of automediality: “The aim of an automedial approach is to discover what texts can tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to portray ‘real’ life and ‘real’ selves through media. The emphasis is on thinking critically about mediation” (Girls, 22). However, Ümit’s thinking about automedia as process has been instrumental to progressing how I am defining and thinking about automediality. For me, though, (and perhaps my background in literary studies is showing here), framing autobiographical production and performance as texts that we can read is a useful framework that allows us to disentangle and examine abstract, slippery concepts like being, living, identity, and selfhood in process in a way that brings the roles and effects of mediation into sharp focus.Retaining the terminology around texts and textual practices—specifically that branch that is concerned with cultural production—also means that we can observe the labour of auto/biography, which is important for thinking about the economies in which automediation occurs as well as acknowledging the work that goes into creating these self-presentations or performances. It takes skills, labour, literacies, and—for me—nuanced understanding and facility with crucial modalities of reading to participate and "play" in any kind of media form. My definition of reading is broad: people read meaning, identities, lives, media, and the world around them in order to figure out how they fit into any given context, and it is the texts produced in even the most fleeting or participatory automediation that record or hold traces of this work, this process, that we as scholars can then examine.The spirit in which I apply “text” is deeply influenced by the field of semiotics within Cultural Studies. The work of semioticians like Saussure, Althusser, Derrida and Lotman that I studied during my undergraduate degree leads me, like many literary scholars, to think about not only cultural products like books and media as texts, but also bodies, surfaces, ephemeral and immaterial performances, and a range of autobiographical practices as texts. As agents we create meaning by reading, decoding, interpreting, and negotiating texts. The work of mediation, for me, is deeply connected to textual practices.I still think that texts—as well as the practices and processes that go into creating, distributing, and reading them—are a productive framework for examining strategies of self-presentation and identity performance. However, Ümit’s observations around process (articulated in her short essay “Vulnerability” and developed here) is particularly vital to thinking about the context for the participation of produsers in media economies where automedial production is often fleeting, ephemeral, and in flux. And I think that the importance of process in analysing more (apparently or materially) stable media is important, too. One way of thinking about a middle ground between text and subject is by considering the concept of becoming as central to the conceptual framework of automediality. Ümit: finding a middle ground.I agree our difference of opinion about viewing these subjects as texts comes from our different disciplines. For you, Emma, the word “text” is important because it emphasises the agency and labour involved in its creation. As a communications and media scholar, I operate on the assumption that communicating the self involves a huge amount of conscious and unconscious work. I take the agency and labour involved in mediating the self for granted. I still have an issue with “text,” however, as taking the process through which it was created for granted. I do concede, though, that we can’t completely disregard the products of mediation, because there are products (as long as we agree that they are in motion), and these are worthy of study.Although mediated subjects and texts can be fleeting and ephemeral, the fact that they are mediated, as you suggest, means that to some extent they are traceable. The mediation of the self means we can see and track its progression, its influencers, its forms, its relationships and dialogues. Although it is changeable and deletable, “doing” (living in relationship with media) leaves a record. On YouTube, for example, I can see the interactions that take place, through comments, likes and subscriptions, and I can therefore trace the subject as it changes. Mediating the self in this way materialises the process of self-formation. Automediality illuminates the process and makes it accessible to us to research. I think the concept of becoming is a perfect middle ground. “Becoming” as a Middle GroundWe are interested in using the concept of automediality to unpack and examine how selves and lives are brought into being through media forms by examining, simultaneously, both the process of mediation and the product (i.e. the autobiographical subjects and text). A crucial part of this examination is attending to the process of construction, of the process through which the textual self is mediated. One way of thinking about this in relation to the construction of lives and selves, is by thinking about how the concept of becoming is traceable in mediation.Rob Cover’s discussion of becoming in social networking is influential to our thinking here. Cover, drawing on Judith Butler, explains that underlying his approach is “the idea that identity and subjectivity is an ongoing process of becoming, rather than an ontological state of being” (56) and he argues that looking at the practices and artifacts of online identity performance can reveal the intricacies of identity in process. Also important here is the work of Stuart Hall who, in 1989, wrote about becoming in terms of how it is implicated in identity as a cultural practice or process:Cultural identity […] is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. […] It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant trans-formation. Far from being eternally fixed […], they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere 'recovery' of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narrative of the past. (70)Hall’s description of becoming as the process by which identity is continually brought into being has parallels to how we are thinking of mediation and life narrative in this issue. Hall is speaking about reading and representing identity, about the processes and products through which people enact, express, perform, and consume identity categories. Similarly, we are looking at subjectivities and identities in process, and we both agree that automediality as a conceptual tool and classifying label turns our attention to the ways in which people identify themselves and others using media. Media use, here, encompasses practices of engagement in terms of both consumption and creation. And, increasingly, users participate by engaging in both production and consumption simultaneously, becoming produsers—a term coined by the editor of this journal, Axel Bruns (2). Bruns’s notion of produsers illustrates the complex relationship between consumers, producers and users in the current media economy (2). One of the significant aspects of an automedial enquiry is the blurring of boundaries between creators and consumers. Automedial subjects are created in dialogue with the other participants in the space. The lives and identities are not only merged with the medium and technologies involved in their creation, but also with the other produsers in the space. This is critical when we begin to explore how to research automediality, as an automedial enquiry demands automediation of the researcher. In order to explore these subjects, the researcher must participate, to some extent, in the practice. Exploring subjects on social media, for example, requires the researcher to create an account and therefore participate in the same activity they are observing/consuming/researching.Questions for Automedial EnquiryTaking these ideas from theory to practice, from our point of view, reading auto/biographical texts and practices through a framework of automediality involves asking some of the following questions and paying attention to some of the following elements:What are the affordances, constraints and features of this medium that have shaped how a subject can inscribe, perform, or construct a self-presentation? As Nancy Baym writes, “our ability to construct an online self-presentation ... is limited and enabled by the communicative tools, or affordances, a platform makes available and our skills at strategically managing them” (124).What networks of power traverse this technology, this medium, and thus this mode of self-presentation?How does this performance of selfhood engage the different autobiographical “I”s: the narrating self and the narrated self; the subject and its creator; the online self and the offline IRL (in real life) self or selves. Although, as Smith and Watson state, “theorists of media and autobiography […] approach the constructed self not as an essence but as a subject” (Reading, 71), we have to acknowledge the person or constructs that exist outside of (and informs) the performance. How do these different facets of the self, and identities, speak to each other in automedia? In what networks of production and consumption does the automedia exist? How is the audience positioned in relation to the text or subject?Surface reading: the textual elements that form the interface between reader and story can tell us about what forces are shaping the self-presentations within the text, and also how the reader is positioned in relation to the autobiographical narrative. What does a surface reading reveal about how the self is being constructed by both media conventions and cultural meanings? The possibility of multiple and fragmented selves. The self that a subject performs or creates in one media platform may be a very different self that they perform in another or that they feel themselves to “be” in “real” life. What is the relationship between these selves? How do they inform and speak to each other?Authenticity is always suspect. Rather than a concrete guarantee that the media presentation correlates truthfully or sincerely to the IRL (in real life) identity or life of the narrator, authenticity in automedia is “an effect created by the form and style” of an auto/biographical performance (Maguire Girls, 11; drawing on Poletti Intimate, 28-9; emphasis added). Thus, it is less useful to weigh up how authentic or how real a particular self-presentation or media form is, and more interesting to examine how particular media constructs or creates effects of authenticity, or makes appeals to truth/authenticity. And finally, method: How can we develop methods to explore automedia which critically examine the text/subject, as well as the “process of doing” (Rak) through which the text/subject is being and “becoming” (Hall). Introducing the ArticlesEach of these excellent articles responds to technological effects on selfhood. By canvassing a range of media forms and approaches to conceptualising the mediation of lives and selves, our contributors’ ideas probe new directions for automediality as a framework for reading and thinking through self-mediation.The feature article, authored by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, proposes that RuPaul’s Drag Race demonstrates automedia in action and suggests that the reality TV show, by modelling “queer time,” presents a challenge to dominant (straight) patterns of temporality in life narratives. This piece presents an argument for considering how identities that have been positioned as marginal are able, through automediality, to reconfigure understandings of what a life and a self can look like.Wes Hill addresses a key claim that we are making when we talk about autmediality: that media interfaces and contexts shape and construct the forms of selfhood that are brought into being through them. Hill takes the case study of artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin and argues that Trecartin’s videos demonstrate a fragmented set of identities that are deeply constituted by a style of performance that Hill calls “Internet-era camp.” Here, Internet-era camp becomes a mode through which to constitute the self through fragmented sets of intertextual and affective meanings. Emily van der Nagel highlights the multi-faceted nature of the mediated self through her investigation of Alt (alternative) accounts on Twitter. Her article demonstrates the way people use different accounts on the same platform for different facets of the self, and for different audiences. Isabel Pederson and Kristen Aspevig extend our discussion of automediality to explore agency and consent in the example of children producing their own automedial subjects and texts on YouTube, in the form of toy reviews. Kylie Cardell explores the digital self-tracking device many of us wear on our wrists, the Fitbit, and asks whether this wearable technology constitutes a diary. In her article, Cardell examines how a Fitbit can become an almanac for self-improvement, where the constant tracking of our physical behaviour changes the way that we live.Anu A Harju critically examines the world of “fatshion” blogging to reveal the relational way “fatshionistas” are formed in dialogue with medium, community and market. Harju situates the self as a product of relations, “borne out of them as well as dependent on them.” Chad Habel takes up masculine gender performance in video games by investigating how genre facilitates (or doesn’t) particular modes of identification by coaxing aggressive gameplay.Mick Broderick, Stuart Marshall Bender and Tony McHugh take a look how artificial intelligence technologies are currently being used to create immersive virtual reality experiences. They question the use of trauma in such projects, and suggest that affect—particularly when used to explore suffering within virtual worlds—needs careful thought moving forward with these technologies.ConclusionThis collection of interdisciplinary scholarship is an exploration of the different ways that people mediate the self. Focusing on mediation as a process that brings the subject into being, these essays explore the connections between lives, selves, identities and media technologies. The textual constructs that hold selves together become traces or products that can perform social functions, but they also have immense richness as objects of study. By taking apart and examining the processes and effects of mediation on life narratives, as scholars we are able to re-focus the microscope on the becoming of lives, selves and identities that are constructed in autobiographical texts. In seeking contributions for this collection, we were guided by two key questions: How do people mediate their identities, selves and experiences? How do media forms and conventions limit or facilitate the possibilities for particular kinds of selfhood to be articulated? Scholars of life narrative warn us that “the self” is not a unified and pre-existing entity that can simply be transcribed or translated through media. Rather, the self is brought into being through writing—or mediation. Media technologies like the camera, the diary, social media platforms, and books each have conventions, affordances, abilities and limits that both enable and restrict the kinds of self-presentation that are possible. Particular media bring particular subjectivities to life. It is our opinion that examining such sites and modes of automediality can tell us about the ways in which “technologies and subjectivity” are connected (Smith and Watson “Virtually” 77), and this is what we hope this collection of work offers to scholars of media and life narrative, as well as those working in interrelated fields. But this is only the beginning. The interfaces between life narrative and media technologies remains an exciting space for new ideas and theories to flourish.Future avenues for investigation of automediality might include examining: the platforms, mediums and technologies of automediality; the affordances of automediality for alternative narratives and identities; the vulnerabilities of mediated narratives and identities; the mediated self as brand/consumable product; cases that explore when automediality is lasting and permanent and when it is ephemeral and shifting; and multiple methodologies for investigating the mediated self, particularly in the context of digital media. An upcoming development that we’re particularly excited about is Anna Poletti’s forthcoming monograph Biomediations which will, we expect, move this thinking forward again.We hope that this issue of M/C Journal inspires more ideas about how media shapes the kinds of selves we think we are, now, in the past, and into the future. ReferencesBaym, Nancy K. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Polity, 2015. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Cover, Rob. “Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 55-69.Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 68-81.Kennedy, Ümit. “The Vulnerability of Contemporary Digital Autobiography.” a/b Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 409-11.Maguire, Emma. Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Meditation in Digital Economies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.———. “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles.” Biography 38.1 (2015): 72-86.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.” The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 153-230.Poletti, Anna. Biomediations. New York: New York UP, forthcoming 2019.———. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2008.Poletti, Anna, and Julie Rak. “The Blog as Experimental Setting: An Interview with Lauren Berlant.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 259-72.Rak, Julie. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38.2 (2015): 155-80.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.