During my MFA studies at Parsons, I developed a series of conceptual websites and online personas, including Free Girl, Devotology, ArtSexyStudio, Escart Girl, Painted O, and Art Child. Some imagery from these archived projects appears below.
These projects emerged during Part III of The Google Project: Conflation = Embrace the Identity as Material. At the time I was interested in the proliferation of self and the possibility that online identity was becoming fragmented, distributed, and multiple rather than singular and fixed. The work developed alongside my essay The Ona Generation.
Looking back, I think of these projects as sketches and experiments. Each website explored a different female archetype, industry, or mode of self-presentation, spanning a spectrum from fashion, religion, and art to porn and surrogacy.
However, they remained largely shells. The websites existed, but the actions did not. I eventually abandoned the approach and closed the sites. Over time I came to feel that continually splitting myself into different characters was diluting the project rather than strengthening it. I became interested in whether a single figure could contain the same complexity. Soon afterward I created Ona Artist, who became the foundation for much of the work that followed.
