Final Paper. 40 Weeks of Pregnancy. Visual & Performing Arts Essay

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40 Weeks of Pregnancy
1541145266065
Fig. 1. Stella Von Burgsdorff in a 40-week documentation of her first pregnancy from Stella Von
Burgsdorff; “Photo Project: 40 Weeks of Pregnancy”; Stellarize Your Life;
/, 17 Nov. 2016,
/home/2016/11/17/photo-project-40-weeks-of-pregnancy.
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Telling is a story, or storytelling, is integral to human experience. For as far back as nomadic cultures, humans are obsessed by documentation of day-to-day and major events in life. The purpose for documentation might not have changed over millennia. If anything, humans appreciate memories. To keep a memory lively, documentation, in all forms and by all means, is part of human experience. The means whereby a memory is kept alive, or recreated, have changed, however, over years. The pace by which an event progresses (and kept) in memory has also changed. Specifically, early human experiences, in pre-historic periods and on until very recently, have undergone little, to no, change. The nature was – is – a still landscape changing only upon major actualities. In a modern world, human interest has changed inwards and has made as of central focus human inner experiences. In an era defined by virtual experiences, coupled by an explosion of social media activity, documentation of human experiences – and, for that matter, interests – has assumed a multiplicity of meanings. For one, personal identity has come to be one major interest, among many, around which a plethora of documentation experiences is created, curated, maintained and developed. Interestingly, identity and self, formerly static, are now in constant shift under virtual conditions of self-(re)presentation. That is, a self (re)presented to a select or global online audience is now not only defined by self creator but, more important, by each and every viewer/user engaging such self in a limited or extended interaction experience. Consider personal websites.
Initially, personal websites are developed for one or a few purposes. These could include, for instance, documentation of personal diaries, as in blogs; selling products, services and/or content; or, engage local or global audiences in one or more campaigning efforts. Time, coupled by growing interactions, redefine personal websites in numerous new ways so that initial
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purposes expand into more ambitious ones redefining self in multiple ways. To put matters into
perspective, images are central to current discussion. Specifically, a collection of images, or
photos, is apt to show how meaning is created, or reenacted, in multiple ways. To understand
how images inform personal human experience – and, for that matter, web-mediated interactions
in visual, narrative forms – a closer examination of one specific example is helpful. For current
purposes, 40 weeks of Pregnancy, a photo project by Stella Von Burgsdorff documenting her first
pregnancy experience (“Photo Project”), is selected. The project offers, accordingly, an ideal
insight into a personal identity created and developed for initial, personal purposes yet evolving
into wider e...