Clare Brant

My name is Claire Brant, and I’m professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in the Department of English at King’s College London, and I also co-direct the Centre for Life Writing Research with Professor Max Saunders.

What attracted me to the Ego Media Project was how contemporary it was and how relevant. This is not just the future but the present of life writing.

It has tremendous scope, it’s global, tremendous scale. It’s everybody. So that sense of relevance, really, was I think the most exciting thing about it.

I think if I was starting now I would pay more attention to environmental implications, and I might even have made that the research project in itself. Everything we do online has an impact in terms of either the carbon footprint, or the materials that we consume to have all this networked life.

We thought long and hard about what to call the Ego Media Project. And we settled on Ego Media partly as a logical successor to ego documents which is the European preferred term for texts of life writing, particularly the historical dimension.

But Ego Media does beg some questions in terms of does the “ego” relate to, for instance, a psychoanalytic model, and in some ways yes it does, and perhaps that’s one thing in the project that we left slightly unaddressed.

My work on diaries was a kind of secondary stream to Ego Media, and it came about because I was approached by Dr. Polly North of the Great Diary Project, who invited me to collaborate on an exhibition.

I thought this was an excellent idea because diaries are one of those genres that have a very long history in print and manuscript, but which also have digital forms. And yet there are print and manuscript diaries continuing in the digital age. So there were new forms of diarizing like bullet journaling, like lifelogging, that one could look at, that were exclusively digital. But there was also a very long history of manuscripts writing of diaries. And at various points they crisscrossed with digital things.

We did the exhibition in the Inigo rooms of Somerset House. And we tried to cover both the history and the multiplicity of forms of diaries.

One thing that working on diaries made me think a lot more about, was about time in the digital. So, diaries are a very time-structured genre on the whole. People write an entry every day or, at least, they’re in dated entries and, of course, everything we do online has a timestamp. So, one way of thinking about diaries in the digital age was to say there are daily traces, or traces of our daily activity, online for everybody. Which is a kind of diary of your online activity.

Imaginative agency came about because I thought life writing does many things, and the scholarship is really fantastic and very broad. But we don’t, on the whole, engage… but we don’t produce much theory. And I thought it would be interesting to try to do something theoretical.

So I was thinking about cultural memory as a concept, and how useful that was in terms of joining up the past with the present in a collective social, but also plastic, kind of way, in terms of being molded to particular instances of connection.

And I thought it would be useful to try to construct something similar for individuals in relation to digital processes, but in such a way that the concept could apply philosophically and aesthetically to nondigital things as well – because the analog world goes on, and people are imaginative in very material ways that also relate to digital.

I think with imaginative agency my thinking evolved in relation to artificial intelligence. What is it that robots and bots mimic us doing? Which, actually, is quite helpful to illuminate human imaginative agency. So there was a question of can bots write poetry? Can bots produce art?

And the answer is yes they can, actually. So, how far the imaginative agency applies to the product, or to the human creator becomes quite interesting. And it helped me think that the imaginative agency could identify particular parts of a process. So, somebody invented a bot who produces rather beautiful art: Simon Colston in 2016. It’s called the Painting Fool. But he designed it in such way that it would also have an artistic temperament. So there are days when it won’t paint at all – it’s just rather sulky and it won’t pick up its brush. And that seems beautifully imaginative in terms of agency also applying to conditions of production.