We didn't come into this project with any utopian ideas about transgressing cultural identities online. Sure, a man can act like a woman. People lie, people tell the truth. But I'll tell you, a real drag king is way more interesting than a virtual one.

We knew web communities are not a way out of gendered, racial, or other performative distinctions. Some web communities re-amplify gender by forcing you to identify yourself as male or female, young or old, etc. They force ‘real’ categories onto a space that does not require them. No. We weren't looking for those types of performances.

In Epithelium, these virtual identities are emergent. Identity slips through the cracks of story-telling, creating a new formulation of identity. Here gender, race, age, disability isn’t a priori, the stories create new means of identification. We will seek to bring out and clarify these new forms of identification.

For example, some characters like "slutty swan and malificent and bunny"  don't  even have a SINGLE identity. When asked "What do you consume/consumes you?" they-he-she-it, answers:

Bullshit consumes me.
I consume way too many cookies.
I am being eaten by the flame every second of my treacherous punishment called life.

Did we need to gender them? Did we have to figure out who is who? Not likely. The identity here slips off the regular scale. There's a multiplicity, but not in the sense of multiple people. There's multiplication of voices, maybe. They're not "real people" or a "real person" but yet they somehow are. Anyone can categorize the responses, get a sense of the character being constructed, but you can't see a person. You can see parts of person, the assimulation of a character. THIS is virtual idenity. In some ways these kinds of identities could be construed as outside the body, disembodied… but we were seeking to create a NEW KIND OF BODY, one that does not have an “identity” in the regular sense.

What kinds of identities does the Internet create? This kind of question requires careful examination. First, it seems illogical to examine the Internet as a creative force, something that generates new identities without looking at the internet as an identity. But every infrastructure, from the letter to the telephone, has its own logic, its own qualities. The telephone creates staticy voices, tonally different from the vocal chords that produce them. In the same way, the internet recodes its users, produces new ways of thinking about who we are and how we present ourselves. This project will mine the QUALITIES of the internet in order to situate identity.

Epithelium as nonfiction performance? Identity is created through performance in everyday life. That is, when you choose between going to the opera and going to the death metal show, that's a formulation of identity. The way you choose to dress, act, etc: performances. Is writing on the website similar to the performance of everyday life? NO. Writing space is a different kind of performative space. Writing is reflexive. People are more aware of themselves when writing. This is a good and bad thing. Since we’re framing the website as a performative space, did people tend to perform themselves? Well, the answer to this question is up in the air. Yes, there was a deliberate nature to the responses. But also, a fluidity to the kinds of writing styles used. The most interesting entries weren't "I am this" and "I am that." They were stories. There were situations, relationships, flows between the user and the environment, the past, the present act of writing. As you can see, I don't know how to answer my own question.

Side note: Virtual terrain. They say the Internet is an information super-highway. I’ve often wondered if this colloquialism originated from the visual image of staring out the window. It makes sense. Like a car, your computer is safe warm place, speeding through the changing terrain. The images play upon your window. You turn left or right. You stop and go. You don’t have a home, you have a vehicle. This all makes sense to me. But on the Web you have no skin, no genitals. The only identity you have is where you’ve been and where you’re going. You are what you buy? (Amazon seems to think so…) You are a trace, a path. You become a map of places that you’ve been, a catalogue of searches, list-servs, etc.