These included:

How do people choose their photograph?
How do they situate themselves?
Is their photograph even of the person it is supposed to represent?
What colours, backgrounds, locations create nuances of the person’s personality?
Do the photos represent a physicality, or rather something intangible, such as a mood, feeling or memory?

This in turn caused me to attempt a way of conceptualizing this way of photographically classifying oneself.
You can see the start of this process here:

Starting to try to organize my brain. (In Illustrator, naturally)

I then printed out all of my photographs and started to arrange the photos (over 500 tiny 1 by 1 inch squares) in various categories. After reading a bit about creating cartographies of the mind (this book, lent to me by Jason Lewis, gave me some great visual references), I began to arrange my tiny squares in a geographic situating of profile pictures

The Faceland Frontier.

The midlands.

The Abstract Islands (slightly south of the Outside Limits).

The whole messed up world.

At this point I realized that I had begun to group these tiny snapshots into specific themes, which included:

People (actual images of the self), which included:

• Face (close up)
• Face (partial)
• Headshot
• Full-body
• Body part

Situated photographs:

People situated within various spaces (interior)
People situated within a home or otherwise domestic space
People photographed with signifiers of domesticity (children, pets, significant others)
People photographed with friends or groups of people (varying from one other person to more than five)

People situated in specific places (exterior):

• In front of buildings
• In front of famous landmarks
• In outdoor spaces associated with the exotic or distant geographic locations
• In outdoor spaces associated with ‘nature’ (i.e. green spaces, the ocean, rivers, mountains etc.)

Abstractions:

Photographs of outdoor spaces
Photographs of indoor spaces
Photographs of themselves as children
Images of toys
Cartoon images (humans)
Cartoon images (animals)
Photographs of animals
Photographs of domestic animals
Celebrities or historical figures
Abstractions of colour, line, or light
Works of fine art

After all of this, I realized my “map” was still disorderly, despite my (intensely detailled) categorization. How was I to represent the inherent ‘sameness’ of the common architecture of online social networking sites in my particular construct?

casting a web

Status wave.

tracking changes in profile updates by using the photograph as document

A series of such dichotomies are presented in my work, particularly between:
familiarity and isolation;
tactility of personal artifacts and ephemerality of online interaction;
recorded history and personal recollection.

Several methods have proved to be significant in my practice, combining traditional mark-making (such as graphite and watercolour) with modern technologies (screenprint media and digital animation). To begin with, I have constructed a stop-motion animation to explain the relational aspects of our personalities and the architecture of Facebook.

Further, I have been observing the temporality and magnitude of two of the most prominent methods with which we receive and transmit personal information: the ‘status update’ and ‘profile photo’. For this exhibition, I will create a two-part, large-scale installation, involving a visual representation of the mass and frequency of status updates collected over the period of one day, as well as the change in individual profile photo appearance over the course of one month. Using iconic imagery by Katsushika Hokusai, I delve further into concepts of markmaking, self-publication, and document. My photographic representation plays with ideas of artifact, memory and process, identified and elaborated within the Facebook rubric.

Using ideas of participatory artwork, as posited by Joseph Beuys, Felix Guattarri, and others, I strive to test the linkages between the personal and private, as well as the mundane and the sublime. I wish to contrast, and question, our desire to be unique, with the urge to publicly broadcast this uniqueness in an increasingly consumptive manner. My work invites others to carefully examine their and others’ interactions throughout the day-to-day life of online social communication.

“[this] is what a practical wisdom of historical narrative requires in this age of easy amnesia – a proper tension between our fidelities to the uniqueness and communicability of memory.” (Richard Kearney)

REQUIREMENTS:

a space about 10 by 10 feet, so that my work can be displayed within a space with sufficent vista in front of the paper. I may also need space to set up a camera in front of the work so that a stop-motion animation of the work can be produced in situ.
A small table holding my bookwork and other documentation would also be helpful, but this can be contained within the space (a 5 foot table would suffice).

Corner of Guy and Notre-Dame

A recent trip to New York provided me with the inspiration.

Here, I saw that a parallel with cluttered nature of internet communications can be found in the cacophony of art, graffiti and other marks made on this wall.

Wythe Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Since I have been interested in public artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey for some time, I decided to go the route of public art. Specifically, I have made a series of paste-up graphic images, made from my own photographs.

no network

All of the phrases I have used were taken from various forms of profile-based online interactions (primarily Facebook and Twitter).

In some of my images, whimsy couples with simple statements like “add friend details” or “What are you doing right now?”.

add friend details

In others, apparently neutral phrases, such as “No network” and “Remove friend?”, reveal feelings of isolation and the fear of social abandonment.

remove friend?

Still more, like “7 friends” and “Become a fan” demonstrate our need to relate inclusively, as well as measure our social standing with numbers or demonstrative membership. I wanted to highlight the uneasiness that sometimes arises online, due to both our availability to public scrutiny, and our inner and outer conflicts and attempts to relate.

7 friends

become a fan

My next challenge is to examine how “clutter” and “visibility” relate to the idea of a ‘wall post’ or, in my instance, ‘graphic paste-up’. Is something more noticeable when it fits into an established form? Or is it harder to see when it doesn’t conform into its milieu?

What spatial and comparative aspects change in transition from the online environment to real life? For example, a wall post on Facebook containing only text may go unnoticed temporarily if a large photographic or video post is adjacent. But is a photographic image, with minimal text, less noticeable on a wall of a building, than a simple message presented in a clear font, or graffiti? How much “visual clutter” is clutter simply due to its being situated within a specific context?

personality-facebook.

à Jeremy Deller

illustration of possible layout for profile installation