Mary Hubbert

Terminally Online

My work is inspired by the macabre, gothic, and the fantastical. I’m compelled by stories exploring the question of what makes a monster monstrous. What are the things that can happen to a person that causes their humanity to twist and warp into something unrecognizable? I’m fascinated by stories of hauntings, of how the echoes of long past events affect the present day. I love exploring how these events and emotions can shape one’s relationship to the people and environment around them. I play with the heightened emotions present within the gothic genre to create emotionally impactful narratives. I find the overlap between the romance of the gothic and the horror of the macabre creates a perfect blend to investigate the previously raised questions of monstrosity and identity.

My thesis project is a narrative web-based comic told through a series of Tumblr blog posts. It follows a teenage girl as she navigates the online world, slowly becoming cut off from reality as she posts more and more pieces of her identity to her blog. I was inspired by the phenomenon of active social media profiles for people who are deceased. The way a person’s presence online can last longer than their physical body has been a fascination of mine, and considering how people generally type in the present tense their online identity becomes a kind of ghost preserved within the internet. I wanted to play with the literalization of that idea, to actually create a ghost within the machine, as a result of excessive social media posting.

emflynnblog.tumblr.com/

@deathvly