A more than cursory glance at the project would reveal that this project is about digital identities and is addressing 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 been used and taken by many active in the field of art, science and philosophy. It is used in the project as a cipher for understandings of digital identity 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
From this we are using the metaphor of cartography, the map, where we have no privileged entry point and is always open to change.

The references we use for this conceptual entry point to understanding digital identity are at the moment:

Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University 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.

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/kellner/deleuze.html