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• 1 2017-11-28T09:26:44-08:00 How The Aesthetic of The Baroque Comes into Play 12 plain 2017-12-08T11:41:23-08:00

  Taking a step back and looking at this baroque aesthetic as something that pushes forward the reality of the simulation that Pieces of Herself embodies, it is interesting that when researching how baroque translates into other languages, it takes on a variety of connected meanings.  While looking from French to English it brings up words like, “exceptional,” or “freakish.”  The Italian translation of baroque, which is “barocco,” translates to bizarre.  The most interesting translation comes from Portuguese, and it comes out as “irregular pearl.”  Mainly biblical in its references, Baudrillard saw baroque as an ornate otherness that conceals some accessible truth, or politics, like mentioned earlier.​  In Pieces of Herself, Davis uses images to push the reader to an overarching truth, like the goal of finding that pearl of truth in a freakishly real simulacrum.  “‘The function of baroque iconography is not so much to unveil material objects as to strip them naked…’ it breaks up reality and represents time by hieroglyphs and enigmas” (Buci-Glucksman, 70).  This is exemplified in our electronic hypertext by its use of items pictured in the room that carry meaning aside from their flat image.  The birthday cake in the kitchen is made to carry much more weight when it is paired with Marilyn Monroe’s sensualized singing.  These multiple levels made possible by code strip the image of its basic meaning and add in stereotypes and obvious binaries.  This is seen in the “real” world through the complexity of each woman’s nature, and an inability to be successfully categorized in any binary.  “One cannot assume that a crucifix worn by Madonna is an expression of her essentially Christian nature, or that wearing high heels reflects a woman’s identifications with a patriarchal sexual economy” (Sawchuk, 57).  These baroque images reflect the multitude of possibilities for women and also critique the limiting categories they are subject to.  Looking at the interviewed woman from the hypertext who wore the clothing and jewelry picked for her by a suitor as a way for being provided for and controlled, it displays “relations of power and their articulation at the level of the body, a body intimately connected to society” (Sawchuk, 52).  Pieces of Herself tunes into women from different places of life, and shows its connection to society by its references, like Oprah on tv, Marilyn Monroe, or relatable heartbreak in the bathroom where you hear, “he said he loved me” (Davis).  The text does this to display an image and transform it into something that can shock the reader into realization.  These baroque images and sounds shatter “its object and fixes reality by…’transform[ing] things and works into writing that stirs the emotions” (Buci-Glucksmann, 70).

      This aesthetic of the baroque is often associated with allegory, and “‘the basic characteristic of allegory...is ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning’” (Buci-Glucksmann, 70).  This ambiguity is crucial to the features of Pieces of Herself, to leave it up to the reader to decide what they discover or realize.  However, this world is not real and “allegory thus consigns reality to a permanent antinomy, a game of the illusion of reality as illusion, where the world is at once valued and devalued,” this causes the baroque to become an “aesthetic - of appearances and play - [which] joins up with metaphysical wretchedness on the ground of grief or melancholy” (Buci-Glucksmann, 71).  While Pieces of Herself feels a lot like a game in that the reader interacts and has the option to attempt to make a character out of themselves, it is clearly not a real world.  However, when listening to the audio files that go along with them and connecting the images of the simulated, online world that the readers character is moving through, the reader begins to feel a true connection to the piece.  The blocked off street outside exemplifies the daily, not as obvious struggles women go through.  The overwhelming honesty expressed through the jarring sounds that get louder as you fill your character, and the limiting scene that gives the readers all they need to reveal this hypertext to themselves as a more honest world than the one they will come back to once they exit the screen.  The connection this hypertext is able to make with the reader is what gives this piece its ability to drastically move and reveal the world to the reader.  If this were presented through just a flat text, the immersion would be non-existent and difficult to understand, but it makes use of appealing audio and media to successfully keep the reader engaged and apart of the conversation.