Technoparticipation: Scrapbooks, stories and secrets

Abstract

In 1993, aged 15, I discovered Dymaxion Chronofile, architect Buckminster Fuller's very large scrapbook which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983. Around the same time, my art teacher at secondary school suggested that I keep a scrapbook of images, This reflective account explores how I have worked with imagery of pages from that very large scrapbook  I kept when I was a teenager in the 1990s for just over five years – my personal private archived of images that in many ways helped to shape my understanding of (gay) male desire at a time when I felt too uncomfortable to come out as gay. The account begins with a poem I have written reflecting upon my motivations around the scrapbook and about the sociocultural context and time which it was produced in; 1990s homophobic suburban Britain. Fast forwarding from the early 1990s to 2021, the account then explains how I returned to my scrapbook as a source of inspiration for creating a poetry film as part of a body of work excavating my personal archive as an artist of over 25 years. The account then discusses how I made use of my scrapbook poetry film as part of Technoparticipation - an ongoing practice-as-research project that explores how technology becomes an additional performer/participant. In other words, how technology participates.