ROSE CHRISTINA

I have started to build a portfolio / website for job opportunities. I would like to apply for junior research positions or work in an agency and see if I can do some guest lecturing!

https://rosechristina.squarespace.com

I have a final title! I decided to tweak it one more time as I decided the study of experience did not need to be addressed in the title, I have a whole section on why a phenomenological approach is appropriate.

The new title is new materiality and phygital dress – which is what I’m proposing, followed by the research question.

New Materiality and Phygital Dress: How are Gen Z performing Self through Smartphone facilitated Self- Representations?

After speaking with Aleks, I am now considering which images to include for the exhibition as due to the aspect ratio of the video, it would not fit with the lcf format.

Below is the advice from Aleks:

I am going to use three out of these 5 images.

Maybe in the screenshot format to showcase Instagram as the focus?

As I was checking over my essay, I realised that the term phygital will still be relatively new to some people reading it. Therefore, I decided to create a simple diagram that demonstrates both my initial idea of phygital (the merging of physical and virtual) and what it developed into.

The second diagram details, in new materialist terms, how self-representations are performative in themselves with material affects. I also attempted to illustrate the way in which virtual and physical still overlap in this process, which is why I think it is necessary to have these two diagrams together.

I was always concerned that I would neglect actual production and fashion if I went down the role of a fully theoretical outcome. I am very interested in the mediatisation of society and it’s impact on the human condition so this is something that can be explored in embodied practice.

I do enjoy actively producing work, that is the whole reason I joined this course, however as a researcher, I can now say that I specialise in fashion media and the intersection between performance, dress and the embodied self.

A skill I have really fine-tuned (which I used to be terrible at) is my self-editing skills. I have been able to edit down my thesis and eliminate 4000 words with confidence. This will really help me in the professional world and it’s a big achievement for me. I followed the process I established in the collaborative review whilst writing for Net-a-Porter, that is, to create a separate document and work across the two.

With a few days to go until hand in, I’ve been checking over the assessment criteria. I feel confident that I have met all the criteria, I did a rationale section to my essay as I felt this wasn’t communicated too clearly throughout, I also added a few more figures to illustrate my findings.

I conclude the thesis with a key findings section, however I think it helps demonstrate my methodology in this flow chart style, so this will be included as a figure.

As i’m now thinking about figures for the essay at this point, I thought I should develop a diagram which illustrates how I broke down the profile to be ethnographically observed.

When exploring how to analyse Instagram and what ethnographic points to take forward specifically, I focused on three points.

The ethnography specifically observed (1) the posts which (in reverse chronological order) collectively form the profile page, (2) the stories (located in a separate section of the profile and only available to be viewed for 24 hours) and (3) a curated highlights section of the stories archive (which can be tapped through at any point).

Therefore the profile should be broken down and understood as a collection of representations, which both individually and collectively, give rise to a narrative about the user’s doings, brought into proximity by the accessibility of the internet, smartphone and social media.

The practice of recording images on screens has interested me for a while, now than I am deeper into my project, I am able to articulate it better.

This concept explores the idea of representations in various contexts having various meanings, this is a way of evidencing that the representations are PERFROMATIVE.