From Confession to Disappearance

Sometime during the summer after Computers and Writing 2001, the eneriwomaninterface disappeared, replaced by a new, static image titled, "eneridotnetinacoma (forever)." Along the bottom of the screen at the left are the words "Eneri.confusion." At right, "I need to hide for a while until you completely forget about me." Out of the image's monochromatic design, the white sternum and arm of eneri (or who we imagine to be eneri) emerges, the remainder of her body dissolving into the white neon trace of text ("expectations"). It is as if the image is an intentional reversal of Chan's general design strategy. As she says in the New Masters of Flash interview, "Whenever I do a piece of motion graphics, I always try to imagine how everything would go together from a blank screen [. . .] from a white [beginning]." For those of us who had the pleasure of browsing the original site, this new page is almost shocking in its absence of color, sound, movement, and links. Only metatag description—that language beneath the surface—provides a trace of life: "but [. . .] what after that? do i continue to hide[?]"

What eneri calls "hiding," however, might be better understood as "disappearance," or what Peggy Phelan might call a "performance of negativity" (165). More radical even than the autobiographic technologies that continually foreground the production of the subject (as opposed to representing the existence of a subject), feminist performance art resists the reproductive economy through its refusal to remain: "the disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered" (Phelan 147). >>>