Body as Trace
Humans leave traces of themselves everywhere and we have been doing this
from the beginning of time. Even the caveman’s simple tools made out of rocks can
be considered traces – extensions of themselves. In today’s technological age, I was
thinking about how everyone spends so much of the day online. We now not only
leave physical traces of ourselves, but digital traces of ourselves as well. It is so easy
to go back in your phone to find an old message or to go back into your browsing
history to find a website you were on earlier that day. Potentially, you could sit
down at an unknown laptop and you could learn a lot about a person by looking at
the traces they leave on their Internet history. Indeed, a person’s browsing history
can share too much – secrets. In contrast, people clear their browsing history to hide
their secrets from people that they do know. I wanted to show this through the
contrasting voices and visual screenshots. Paired with the dusted latent fingerprints,
I aimed to convey how these are secrets that people do not know about individuals
because they are deliberately hiding them. These secrets are invisible, but they leave
evidence physically, although not immediately visible. The immediately visible trace
of the browser history can also be deleted, and once again the secret is invisible.
Video Link: OliviaSwinford