Why use the word rhizome? This project is about digital identities and addresses the issue of the fractured nature of the self when our online identities become distributed across multiple sites and services. Rhizome is a Deleuzian concept that has energised thinking and creativity in the arts, science and philosophy. It is used in this project as a cipher, or a departure point for representing digital identities as:
- decentralised
- unpredictable
- connected
- branching in many directions
- having multiple entry points
- with no single true view, only partial perspectives
- and constituted as a multiplicity of dimensions where we lose the illusion of the objective all seeing eye/I
Deleuze leads us to cartography and the map, a space which has no privileged entry point and is always open to change.
Deleuze & Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and Foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1987. Sermijn, Devlieger and Loots (2008). The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story. Qualitative Inquiry, (14)4:632–650.
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