Étant donnée : une fable poétique sur le régime de notre identité numérique

• Main Author: Cécile Portier
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Pléiade (EA 7338) 2016-07-01
• Series: Itinéraires
• Subjects: data; digital tracks; identity issues; surveillance; memory; privacy
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/3124

Étant donnée is a web fiction inspired by the famous work of Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés. A woman is discovered, she is amnesiac, doesn’t even know who she is. The data can help naming her, and finding again her whole life. Cécile Portier wrote this fiction and invited other writers and artists to participate. In this paper, she proposes a sort of “guided tour” of the story. The different parts of the website are the successive steps of a worrying inquiry, because we progressively understand that pricacy, individual subjectivity, is no longer necessary to define someone’s identity. Everything is already known and written. But the story suggests that it is possible to withstand this pressure of the data, and that litterature, perhaps, can help regain control on our lifes.