Artifice and Artifact: Technology and the Performance of Identity

[Introduction]: “Atom Egoyan has said that the “containers we use to store experience” express as much meaning as the experiences themselves (Egoyan 2002). Indeed, in his highly self-reflexive work, audio and visual media technologies—tape recorders and complex musical structures, along with screens, cameras, mirrors, and other devices—drive both the plot and the characters within it, serving as arenas through which the characters can perform and act out their identities. In all his films and in his work in television, opera, and installation, we can see Egoyan establishing, directing, and recalling to us our relations to the act of viewing, even as he provides a commentary on his own use of these media technologies. What emerges from his particular attentiveness both to the formal qualities of media and to the manner in which this materiality acts on and is acted upon by subjective perceptions is a sustained exploration of a unique interplay of human desires, pathologies, compensations, and even redemptions in and through representational media. Egoyan’s ability to capture and engage the overdetermined ways in which technology “means” has made his work an important part of contemporary debates about the ways technological possibilities are intertwined with historically specific “structures of feeling” (Williams 1974). If his work ignited the attention of scholars like Paul Virilio and others interested in the relationship between media, forms of knowing, and modes of being, this might be because, as Jonathan Romney puts it, Egoyan is a leading contender for being the “most alluringly postmodern” filmmaker (2003, back cover). The authors in this section draw from a wide range of sources to reconsider Egoyan’s approach to technology, showing how his use of technological artifacts reflects and refracts his interest in existential and phenomenological questions as well as his understanding of the epistemological.”