Samantha Simpson,
                                                The Life Story Project,
                                                              multimedia
                                              installation, 1996.







                                        


 The Life Story Project is a constantly evolving database of personal histories. I have collected anonymous life stories on my computer and on the Internet at 

http://www.sirius.com/~samsim/lifestoryintro.html. My program classifies the memories it receives according to participants' names and ages and the words used in their responses. Users/viewers can read participants' narratives covering the course of several years in their lives, read all the entries that refer to a specific age or search for every memory containing a particular word.







I am interested in calling out the structures we are creating as we seek to reconcile a romantic, heroic model of the self with our new understanding of information systems and our distressed sense of individuality in society. 








    







Traditional narrative structures and psychological metaphors that define the self are in conflict with the new technological paradigms generated by the Internet. The vast amount of self-publishing on the World Wide Web both emphasizes and defeats our sense of ourselves. The sheer number of people offering accounts of their lives on the web creates a visceral, accessible sense of population that is unique to our generation. This challenge to our centrality in the universe threatens to disrupt our sense of ourselves as the primary characters in our own narratives. As we move away from the literary idea of ourselves as characters, we will integrate the new structures we use to organize information with the ways we organize the details of our lives. The nonlinear progression of the narratives in my database allows users to explore alternate paradigms of the project's personal histories without losing the individual voices.






 









Samantha Simpson, c/o Savannah College of Art and Design, 342 Bull Street, P.O. Box 3146, Savannah, GA 31402. E-mail: ssimpson@stetson.edu




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