![]() ![]() The serial paintings titled, Index (To Jeremy Lawson) painted by Jeremy Lawson, serve as residue of the exchange. Lawson proposes an exchange to step out from virtual space and cement this project in the real world. ![]() Lawson invites the contacted Jeremy Lawsons to transcend their “individual anonymities” and connect unimaginably in real life. Simultaneously, Index problematizes virtual space, reminding us that despite the virtual, we are still material bodies. Index wrestles with Lawson's “fluctuating sense of personal scale in the age of the internet,” subverting the constructs of self and the potential fallacy of individuality guided in part by a distrust of capitalist constructs. In an absurd, but very serious proposition, Lawson suggests he and the other Jeremy Lawsons become a unit of one, consolidating the multiplicities of Jeremy Lawson. In this project, one's name is a powerful and arbitrary means to investigate the anxiety of personal scale related to the construction of self and individuality, in both a personal and a depersonalized way. His email sets up a cascade of questions with the intention to deeply investigate how one's name operates, serves, and/or undermines identity in both the virtual and real world. Paralleling Russell's use of the internet as a source of creative material, Jeremy Lawson's Index begins in cybernated space as a performative email, Untitled (Index Proposal), sent to other Jeremy Lawsons found through Instagram, LinkedIn, and personal websites. Russell defines the 'glitch' as an instance of refusal: it “creates a fissure within which new possibilities of being and becoming manifest." The virtual world which Russell traverses in Glitch Feminism is the location of refusal, subversion, and transcendence for the material body. The internet mediates the material world, constructing spaces in the abstract for the de-materialized body. LUVPUNK12 was free to traverse cybernated landscapes, transmuting anonymously, unrestrained by the limitations of the corporeal. Russell identified with bodies relegated to the margins of the mainstream. As a teenager, she assumed the virtual avatar LUVPUNK12, an adaptation of early childhood influences from her L.E.S neighborhood: punks, drag shows, and Boricua culture. In Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Russell asserts that the internet is the space for creative material. It's an alien life form.We're on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” The journalist, baffled by Bowie's statements, suggested the internet was merely a tool like the telephone. During this time, the virtual world was in its infancy. The future Bowie illustrated was entirely different from the counterculture he had helped form. In 1999, David Bowie gave a prescient interview with BBC Newsnight, describing the rebellious and subversive culture just beginning to emerge on the internet.
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