Between Autonomy and Self-Creation in the Information Age

Abstract

Google’s technological services offer us a tempting proposition: we delegate portions of our information and autonomy to them, and in return they assist us in generating images and videos, thereby providing us with works of art “personalized” to our modes of creation. This article discusses Google’s Clips camera, a product belonging to the field of autonomous photography, in order to demonstrate how the very notion of self-creation is transformed in the information age. Artistic production through the Clips camera exemplifies the broader shift in creative processes in the digital era, in which not only techniques of creation are altered but the creator themself is transformed. This is particularly evident in the process of outsourcing parts of the self to what may be termed “Google’s self,” a construct generated from the data we provide – simultaneously ours yet not ours, with us yet belonging to Google’s cloud. For the sake of artistic creation, aspects traditionally considered intrinsic to the creative self – intention, agency, and rationality – must be delegated outward. For the purposes of this study, I sampled user reviews of the Clips camera in order to phenomenologically analyze the experience of its use and to investigate what it reveals about contemporary conceptions of the creative self in the information age.