Juliana Huxtable’s There Are Certain Facts that Cannot be Disputed address the relationship between the ephemeral nature of digital information and the drive for historical documentation in cyberscape in three acts. The Internet represents for Huxtable a venue for exploring narratives that have been discarded or misplaced in the margins of history. In the first vignette entitled TRANSIT, Virginia producer Elysia Crampton set the tone with an settling soundtrack using samples of gunshots and distant yelling. Images of Huxtable and her collaborator hung on the wall, along with torn and blown-up scraps of text appearing to come from academic papers. Clips of historical and period films flickered on a revolving TV screen, movies ranging from Sofia …show more content…
Walking from the rear of the stage, Huxtable takes center stage while a holographic light focuses and scans the full length of her body, importing her into the rotating screen behind her. A shrill violin accompanies her as she expresses anxieties about the ephemeral nature of the Internet archive. Huxtable’s digitally modulated voice reads out a series of letters dedicated to “a lost era of technology and great virtual cities”―messages addressed to Geocities. The final chapter, titled AVATAR deals with the small online communities of which Huxtable was a part of, focusing on the switch from text to visual culture on the Internet. Juliana refers not only to image-sharing sites like Tumblr, but also video gaming and cosplaying. Such one-off references confuse and prove to be at times difficult to follow. Chronological time collapses and skews history as she overloads “the older, whiter version of ‘the man’ past” with fast and feminist fictions. In this fluid and collaborative mode, Juliana approaches history and …show more content…
The question of experience is intimately tied to that of visibility, as is clear from the word “evidence.” Evidence, means literally, what is perceptible and made obvious (ex-videre), but is also a word used in the context of the police work and in the court. The evidence is the proof brought forth to demonstrate innocence or guilt, it is the basis, in a factuality or a reality that merges with the order of the visible (or that is recognized as “reality” only because it appears or may appear as such in the eyes of all), of a judgment that states both the law and the truth. Huxtable’s narratives are elliptical like the footage, challenging our expectation of the kinds of information that should be archived or the ways in which cultural knowledge might be visually and discursively embodied. Confronted with Huxtable’s multiple embodiments, and thus with multiple indexical fields of reference, we face the virtual as an emergent set of social realities that cannot be straightforwardly extrapolated from the physical world but always entangled in itself. The “self” is produced when an individual is embedded in a social configuration conceived in theatrical terms, coupling intersubjective dynamics with a mobilization of pre-established social functions (in the theater these are called parts). The virtual body is an