L'impulso autoetnografico: radicamento e riflessività nell'era intermediale

The essay moves from an exploration of an elusive but increasingly compelling field: the pervasiveness of autobiography in the contemporary media landscape. From artistic and experimental practices to non-fiction film, from collaborative digital projects to confessional modes of self-representation in television and internet, such a personalisation of art and the media may be seen, in broad philosophical terms, as a consequence of postmodern discourse and as a result of the growing fragmentation of the human experience in a globalized world. Nevertheless, as many media projects show, such focus on subjectivity does not imply a definitive displacement of the self, neither a closure within the horizon of one’s self. On the contrary, the impulse of self-investigation and self-reflection is linked to a real desire of communication, where the addresser engages with the addressee within a shared space of embodied subjectivity. Finally, the contemporary proliferation of first-person modes of expression in audiovisual and digital media responds to a common vocation to attest the social nature of the I, which means the essential embeddedness in his or her life world.