Remember Andy Warhol and his fifteen minutes of fame for everyone? His derivative works involving Campbell’s Soup and Marilyn Monroe? The internet has changed the definition of fifteen minutes and modern technology infinitely decreased the barrier of entry for creation and communication of derivative works. What particularly fascinates me is the way that the internet is temporally unhinged. Those fifteen minutes now last forever. Any media uploaded and the commentary typed about it will remain indelibly on the web. Googleable, screen-shot, archived, waiting to be stumbled-upon, reblogged. Things that happened years ago are also happening right now on monitors and smart-phones across the world.

I am a minor public persona, “micro-famous.” Right now, according to the internet, I am eighteen, twenty-one, *and* my real time current age of teetering-on-the-edge-of-twenty-five. I’ve been recorded at frequent intervals in my life expressing opinions on various subjects. Video and print magazine interviews usually don’t see the light of cyberspace for months after they’ve been done. Internet-only publications can still be a no man’s land fraught with lack of journalistic integrity. People will repost an old interview or set of photos as though it is new to drive more traffic to their site, further confusing the timeline. If you could line up my statements on a particular topic in chronological order it might be interesting to watch a mind evolve and mature. If arranged at random, they sometimes directly conflict each other. 

You sort of get used to it. Sometimes a new person unacquainted with living in public steps into your life and causes you (me) to see it with new eyeballs. I firmly believe that my existence on the internet is merely a heightened, sped-up version of what we’ll all be considering normality in the next decade, although most will probably be doing it with a bit more clothing on.

On Thursday evening I watched a segment of the Colbert Report while lounging on Matt’s lower body (Matt my ovarian cyst busting boyfriend from Take Care Of Your Vagina… and the wonderful and skilled lover from Feel). The Rev. Sir Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A., played by Stephen Colbert the actual person was being scanned by Makerbot which is company that makes semi-affordable 3D printers. The data from his scans went on Thingiverse, a website which hosts open source 3D model designs. The process of being scanned involves lasers (super ultra awesome) and coincidentally my friend Molly Crabapple had just tweeted about her Makerbot experience. I wanted to get Makerbot-ed. I wanted to get Makerbot-ed real bad. Modern technology and social networking websites made it happen - quickly. 

By Friday afternoon I was leaving Makerbot’s temporary workshop in Brooklyn with cornstarch all over my head (the lasers have trouble picking up very dark colors) and a promise that the man who scanned me would use his 3D animation skills to put a Sphinx body on my head and shoulders and make it into an object I could take home at a later date. I get to be a Sphinx made by something called a Makerbot. I had a miniature nerd-gasm, let out a squeak so high-pitched people on the next block flinched, and hugged the man so forcibly that it may have been more of a body slam.

My 3D bust data will also be going on Thingiverse. Digital 3D representations of my body are now open source. Please experiment. Please keep it reasonably classy.

This is one more way in which I will live forever on the internet, trending towards Gibson’s Idoru. 

I have Bre Pettis’s plastic head on my bookshelf.