The Beauty and the Geeks Di Ball attempts to get her geek back...

At ISEA Sin­ga­pore I pre­sented an artist talk en­ti­tled " I am so off my­Face: I used to be the old­est geek girl in the world but I lost my geek ...". In 2011, I will at­tempt to get my geek back. Pro­claim­ing my­self " Beauty in res­i­dence", I will par­tic­i­pate in the great­est gath­er­ing of geeks and blog the re­sults. If you see me across a crowded room, please HELP ME!!

Dates: 

Sat­ur­day, 17 Sep­tem­ber, 2011 (All day)

 

Di Ball in her of­fice

Lo­ca­tion: 

Sa­banci Cen­ter, Lev­ent

 

In 2008 at ISEA Sin­ga­pore I pre­sented an artist's talk en­ti­tled " I am so off my­Face: I used to be the old­est geek grrl in the word but I lost my geek and now I am just the old­est grrl in the world". I ex­plained that as tech­nol­ogy had moved to meet my needs, I had be­come more un­able to use it. I de­scribed my jour­ney both IRL (in real life), and URL (un­real life); I in­tro­duced Fleur Ball and Krys­tal Ball and Beach Ball and Glo Ball. I spoke of my work as an early techo­e­van­ge­list and called her iBall. I ended with a frame grab of my hideous fat-ar­sed hara­juku avatar ac­ci­den­tally set­ting fire to her own hair in an at­tempt to enter Sec­ond Life.
Ar­s­man­i­festo blogged:

(...........) Be­tween pop cul­ture, human grit­ti­ness, provoca­tive un­der­min­ing of con­tem­po­rary tech­nol­ogy and a sane sense of humor about the in­san­ity of our con­tem­po­rary lives, the nos­tal­gia and sen­ti­men­tal­ity of her art prac­tice fil­ters through the wit of her per­for­mances.

My life has  been de­scribed to me as a search for my medium of cre­ativ­ity. I have been an ar­chi­tect, a per­former in a wheelie bin en­sem­ble, a coun­try and west­ern singer and a human statue. I now call  my­self an artist (new media, hy­brid, what­ever is the lat­est term for mixed and var­ied ) and op­er­ate/per­form dif­fer­ent per­sonae under the uber­ti­tle " the ball­Park: my life as a theme park".

Like a disco ball faceted with mul­ti­ple mir­rors, she re­flects as­pects of pop­u­lar cul­ture using an ever-grow­ing se­ries of in­di­vid­ual per­sonas, each with a name de­rived from her own. There’s Krys­tal Ball the cyber clair­voy­ant, Fleur Ball the cun­try (sic) & west­ern singer, Meet Ball the on­line in­tro­duc­tion agency madam, and most re­cently Glo (Glo­ria) Ball the in­ter­na­tional trav­eller and celebrity hunter. (……..)

She has a beady eye for the most ex­quis­itely naff as­pects of mod­ern life and an abil­ity to find the user-friendly as­pects of French fem­i­nist the­ory. Ball is part Julia Kris­teva part Edna Ever­age She rev­els in a promis­cu­ous fa­mil­iar­ity with low­brow as­pects of the mass media, from new age women’s mag­a­zines to tele­vi­sion body makeovers. [1]

Tech­nol­ogy has pro­vided me with a medium al­low­ing for mul­ti­ple out­comes, and in the heady early days I rev­elled in its po­ten­tial. As i was sub­sumed by the joy of con­nec­tiv­ity, I felt like the kiddy in the candy shop, nose pressed against the glass of pos­si­ble plea­sure. I want to re-con­nect my ideas with the po­ten­tial ofered by to­days' tech­nol­ogy and yearn a re­turn to wear­ing my geek­grrl badge with pride.

"The Beauty & the Geeks" ap­pro­pri­ates its name from a re­al­ity tv show where in­tel­li­gent geek stereo­types are matched with pneu­matic bo­somed per­ox­ided bar­bie babes  in the hope that they will learn to love the dif­fer­ences in each other and find com­mon ground. I will "per­form" the beauty, in it­self a com­ment on pop­u­lar cul­ture ideals of beauty. My mis­sion state­ment is to at­tend lec­tures, work­shops and of course par­ties and doc­u­ment this hope­ful jour­ney back to geek­dom. I de­scribe this pro­ject as a per­for­mance or in­ter­ven­tion, and the blog out­come a self por­trait bor­row­ing from the Fou­cault no­tion that "we must cre­ate our­selves as works of art".

“Di’s itin­er­ary of per­sonae each have ‘bound­ary sto­ries to tell – how they came to be here – and roles to play in both vir­tual and real life. (Her) per­sonae (…)rep­re­sent var­i­ous of Di’s sub­jec­tive and em­bod­ied ex­pe­ri­ences. In short, as Di claims, “all my work is about me and the things I’ve done”. Given this, the per­sonae are not merely masks, but rather bi­o­graphic ren­der­ings emerged from a re­ally ‘out there’ life. [2]

1. Mor­rell, Tim­o­thy (2006) Aus­tralian Art Col­lec­tor, p126

2. Car­roli, Linda (1999) Krys­tal Clear: cat­a­logue essay

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