Episode #6, Neil Bickerton – Pizza

A gas-tower production Pizza

A video media performance by Neil Bickerton

In the shifting tides of web location in the disembodied and global age of digital communication, the conditions for understanding ideas of community have shifted from a specific geo-location to wherever it is you share a particular set of interests and allegiances; it could be argued that the word community takes on an entirely new meaning. Community exists on the particular websites, blogs and technologies. Identity is corralled into loose groupings of style, fashioned from commodities, technology and media. In the hegemonic peer-to-peer network there is the confusion or collapse of identity because everyone constantly speaks in the first person, ‘I’ becomes an echo chamber of being, loneliness and loss of sincerity. Pizza playfully satirizes the loss of idealist narratives and the alienation of ‘being’ online, abstracting notions of participation and performance from any material expression.