Artist's Statement

Hannah Kane
Writing Assignment #2
Artist’s Statement
Film and Literature
17 Nov. 2010

The piece of writing that follows may or may not be an essay. It was posted in its raw, original form at one of my blogs, before I copied and pasted it into a Microsoft Word document, tweaked the formatting somewhat, and generally attempted to make it presentable. My aim in doing this was to give my writing a sense of temporality, of grounding in time, of trajectory – perhaps even narrative trajectory. This also serves to underscore the self-reflectivity and reflexivity of my piece; essentially, it became an online account of a personal history, created entirely using a personal computer: my HP Pavilion Entertainment PC. As I wrote and researched and posted to the blog, I saw a cyclical pattern and made note of it in my text: that sometimes, during Google searches for information, I would come across my own blog.
One thing that stands out about this essay is the amount of quoting. Especially in the section about Wikipedia, I wanted to get user-generated descriptions of the online phenomena I discussed. I feel that my choice of material cited – almost entirely Wikipedia – is a valid choice stylistically and serves to underscore my main point(s?). By preserving the source formatting, I hope to give the sense that the person reading my essay is actually reading Wikipedia, but necessarily not actual Wikipedia. What appears in the following essay is Wikipedia as it appeared when I did my research, as unadulterated as I could make it, so that the reader is equipped with the same knowledge I had when I wrote my commentary. Because it is constantly edited, Wikipedia is subject to near-perpetual change; what the reader of my essay might see if I merely referred them to the pages I visited, they might come into my discussion with different source material.
But now, I feel I must return to the question of whether this work is an essay. In the sense of the French word essai, from which our English word derives, I have most certainly written an essay – an attempt. On a deeper level, too, the essayistic traits of this work manifest themselves. In class, we came up with four primary qualities that define the essay. First, essays tend to discuss small or localized topics. This allows the essayist to move between the specific and the general. The topic I was assigned, computers, was a fairly broad topic; I had to narrow it down to personal computers, which are (obviously) narrower. I also incorporate history, couching my discussion in terms of both personal history and global history. Because of this, I necessarily had to move between the specific and the general. Secondly, our class decided that an essay must be refracted from the point of view of the essayist – be they writer, filmmaker, or creator in some other medium – but essays are not about the essayist. We also discussed the rhetorical trajectory of the essay, and agreed that essays allow for contradiction, open-endedness, and the reader’s own ideas and thoughts. Further, we defined the essay as a free-form patchwork of varied textual sources. I think this piece clearly meets these criteria.
Trickier, perhaps, is our concept of the essayist as analytical outsider. This status allows for cheek, irony, maybe even melancholy. Am I an outsider here? I can’t quite tell. I do, I suppose, champion a point of view that I have not seen discussed elsewhere, a point of view which I would be willing to bet is, in fact, extremely unpopular. Come to think of it, I dispute the notion that Wikipedia is worthless and unreliable – that is certainly an outsider position. Whether I come across as cheeky, ironic, or melancholy, I do not think I am, at this point, self-aware enough to determine.
Finally, this piece has taken on an online life of its own. As previously mentioned, this essay was posted in its original form as a series of posts at http://talkingstove.blogspot.com/. During winter break, I hope to produce – using only my PC – at least one video, to be posted to my YouTube account, related to this topic. If nothing else, though, this project will live on in this consolidated, written form, as I intend to keep expanding on it, and make it long enough to function as my contribution to National Novel Writing Month. Thus, parts of this piece will survive in snippets at http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/559112, if nowhere else.
In sum, I firmly believe that the following piece falls within the realm of the essay. I worry that I ramble on too long, or that my point is not clear enough; however, both of these qualities cement this work inside the field of the essayistic. Also of concern, to my line of thinking, is the amount of quoting and citation included in the ensuing text. In addition to citing the internet – in terms of both independent websites and Wikipedia proper – I quote two of my favorite books written by two of my favorite authors: Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I also include a quote about the nature of history, which I found on Wikipedia. I almost feel immoral doing this, but the form allows it, and I am trying as hard as I can to make sure credit is given where it is due.
One last note: in class, we touched on the notion that one of the most important practices, one of the fundamental rules of writing, is that the writer should keep his or her audience firmly in mind. My audience is the internet, the public in general – the readers of my blog; but also, this is for my dad, for my siblings, for my friend Fernando, whose inquiries into the life of his grandmother inspired me to contemplate the mysteries of my grandfather’s time on Earth.
Without further ado, I hope you, the reader, enjoy my essay.