Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

5-2019

Document Type

Capstone Project

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Matthew K. Gold

Subject Categories

Digital Humanities | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Nonfiction | Other English Language and Literature | Other Film and Media Studies | Poetry

Keywords

affect, new media, embodiment, web aesthetics

Abstract

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an affectual experience that interrogates the modalities of embodied internet aesthetics by imagining a different way to build and write online spaces: handcrafted and unauthoritative. The project aims to reveal the internet as a constructed space that is capitalistic, un-empathetic, and inherently embodied (often to the exclusion and persecution of othered bodies). Through the process of writing and coding the website, I was able to consider what distressed me about online spaces, how they achieved that affect, and how language and aesthetics could create an alternative space that felt purposefully different not only to me but to anyone visiting.

Comments

Online component: ExistentialMD.com

Additional Files
Ochshorn.zip (609 kB)
Archived website as a WARC file, created using webrecorder.io – web archive player available at https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorderplayer-electron
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