Guest Speaker: Lara Ratnaraja

Lara Ratnaraja, a Cultural Consultant and Co-Producer ASTONish, will give a guest talk in the school.

Digital Identities

Identity has always been a social construct largely based on how others physically perceive you. Be that gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexuality or faith, others base their assumptions on their own inherent conscious and subconscious prejudices.

The rise of the online digital persona makes this subjective identity increasingly irrelevant – and self-identity implicit. Now you get to dictate how you want to be perceived by naming your message, your personal communication style, and how you present your own identity. You can affiliate to the digital tribes you wish to, and fracture and fragment the narrow strictures of identity construct.

If a digital identity is “information on an entity used by computer systems to represent an external agent. That agent may be a person, organisation, application” then under-represented artists can create and lay claim to their own identities and rewrite the identities ascribed to them.

About Lara

Lara is a freelance consultant specialising in ideas, innovation, leadership, collaboration, cultural policy implementation within the HE, cultural and digital sector. She develops and delivers projects and policy on how cultural and digital technology intersect for a number of national partners as well as programmes around leadership, resilience and business development for the arts and creative industries.