Week 8 – Social Network: Digital Identity

Summary

Global telecommunications has challenged and penetrated all previous notions of the divide between public and private space. We’ll take a critical look at mobile media, webcam technology, and social media, concerning the changing nature of the self and our relation to others in the transparency and sharing of information inherent in our online interactions. We will also look at how artists have exploited social media as part of their practice, both in terms of expanding their community and as a platform for artistic creation. As our personal lives have become increasingly public, exposed, and sometimes exploited, how can we develop a critical stance on these developments and incorporate thoughtful criticism into our artistic investigations.

 

Outline

Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience 2.0 (2003)

In the post 9/11 climate, on one of his many trips abroad, Hasan Elahi(of Bangladesh descent) was taken aside by airport security as a suspected terrorist. Other than his middle-eastern roots, there was no reason to arrest him. However, the authorities warned him that they would be watching him very closely, regardless of the fact that he was an innocent college professor teaching new media art. Thus began Tracking Transience 2.0, Elahi’s epic work of self-surveillance that continues to this day. Elahi performs 24/7 tracking of his geo-spatial coordinates as an act of self-espionage, giving up his data as a subversive performance that engages and critiques issues of surveillance and privacy. As a professor at the University of Maryland Near Washington, DC, his proximity is broadcast to the world for all to see.

Hasan Elahi, self-surveillance, Tracking Transience 2.0

Elahi decided, as an act of confrontation and artistic mediation, to prove to the authorities that he could do a much better job of tracking himself than they ever could. You could call it data camouflage. Elahi began to photograph and time stamp his every meal, every airport, every bathroom, every toilet, every hotel bed and posted the photos online, defiantly, abundantly.

Now the authorities would know everything and nothing about Hasan Elahi. He would maintain his own profile and dossier that is more evasive than ever. A performance? I suspect so. It is a dance around 21st surveillance and overwrought security. But it is also a critique of the millions, in fact billions of individuals who willingly and gladly give up their data everyday via social media. And who have no idea where their data goes and how it is used.

As Hal Niedzvincki claims, “we live in a peep society: we peep on each other, we peep on ourselves.” Now, with Elahi, you can selectively give up your data as a screen to hide your real life from those who would use it for their own gain, or use it against you. If in fact Marcel Duchamp unveiled the toilet as a “readymade,” a work of art by sheer force of the artist intent, Elahi has given us the toilet as an object of everyday life that renders himself, the artist, anonymous. Not only is he effacing his artistic self, he has become just another face in the crowd. This is art as camouflage mimicking objects as lifeless, nondescript entities that reveal absolutely nothing about the artist sharing the objects.

Perhaps this is a critique on the saturation of self-documentation, all of us who wield our cameras and cell phones taking photographs of everything and anything. Why? Because we don’t want to forget, the media carries a sense of purpose through memory, an archive of one’s life, preservation of the moment. When I presented Hasan with my documentation of his documentation, he could remember every place where each and every photo had been taken. Each of these images, no matter how empty (and his photos are typically void of people), no matter the sameness, brought back to him a specific moment in time and space. That is the life recorded and remembered through media representation.

So who is tracking whom? According to Hasan Elahi, we are tracking ourselves. Each and every one of us is a self-made spy keeping a close eye on our actions, our moods, our interactions, our everyday lives: the panopticon turned inward. What began as a critique of government intrusion on personal privacy during the George W. Bush years in the US, has become a performance in self-styled personal surveillance. Hasan Elahi is his very own Central Intelligence Agency with one subject: himself.

My interview with Hasan Elahi:

Hasan M. Elahi (born 1972) is an interdisciplinary media artist with an emphasis on technology and media and their social implications. His research interests include issues of surveillance, sousveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers.He was born in Rangpur, Bangladesh and raised in New York City. Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, citizenship, migration, transport, and borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sundance Film Festival, Kassel Kulturbahnhof, The Hermitage, and at the Venice Biennale. Elahi was recently invited to speak about his work at the Tate Modern, Einstein Forum, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, World Economic Forum, and at TED Global. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at University of Maryland and from 2011 to 2014 was Director of Design | Cultures + Creativity in the Honors College.

Paolo Cirio & Alessandro Ludovico, Face to Facebook (2001)

From the artist’s Website:

How we did it:

Through special custom software we collected data from more than 1,000,000 Facebook users. What we collected is their “public data” – some of their personal data (name, country, Facebook groups they subscribe to) plus their main profile picture and a few friend relationships. We built a database with all this data, then began to analyze the pictures that showed smiling faces. The vast majority of pictures were both amateurish and somehow almost involuntarily or unconsciously alluring. And they are almost always “smiling”.

It’s also evident that the majority of users want to appear in the best shape and look. They are acting on Facebook’s mandatory mechanism: establish new relationships. Facebook is based on the voluntary uploading of personal data and sharing it with friends. The more friends the better. Being personal and popular a Facebook user is exposing him/herself to many others, continuing to establish new relationships.

Once the database was ready, we studied and customized a face recognition algorithm. The algorithm used self learning neural networks and was programmed to “group” the huge amount of faces we collected (and their attached data) in a few simple categories. The categories are among the most popular that we usually use to define a person at a distance, without knowing him/her, or judging based only on a few behaviors. We picked six categories (“climber”, “easy going”, “funny”, “mild”, “sly” and “smug” – working definitions), with some intuitive differences, for both male and female subjects.
The software effectively extracted 250,000 faces that were connected to the relevant public data in our database.

After grouping them, we started to dive into these seas of faces, with all the perceptual consequences. And we started to think about why we felt so overwhelmed… Continue reading

Theory:

Face-to-Facebook, smiling in the eternal party.

Social networking is naturally addictive. It’s about exploring something very familiar that has never been available before: staying in touch with past and present friends and acquaintances in a single, potentially infinite, virtual space.

The phenomenon challenges us psychologically, creating situations that previously were not possible. Before the rise of social networking, former friends and acquaintances would tend to drift away from us and potentially become consigned to our personal histories. Having a virtual space with (re)active people constantly updating their activities is the basic, powerful fascination of the social network. But there’s another attraction, based on the elusive sport (or perhaps urge) to position ourselves. The answer to the fundamental identity question, “who am I?” can be given only in relation to the others that we interact with (friends, family, work colleagues, and so on). And the answer to this question seems clearer after we take a look at our list of social network friends.

So an intimate involvement and (endless) questioning of our online identity (often literally juxtaposing with our physical one) is perpetrated in the social network game. But social network platforms are not public organizations designed to help support social problems but private corporations. Their mission is not to help people create better social relationships or to help them improve their self-positioning. Their mission is to make money. Economic success for these corporations rests on convincing users to connect to the several hundred people who await them online. Continue reading...

Authors’ biographies

Paolo Cirio works as media artist in various fields: net-art, street-art, video-art, software-art and and experimental fiction. He has won prestigious art awards and his controversial works have been sustained by research grants, collaborations and residencies. He has exhibited in museums and art institutions worldwide. As public speaker he delivers lectures and workshops on media tactics.

Alessandro Ludovico is a media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine since 1993. He’s one of the founders of the ‘Mag.Net (Electronic Cultural Publishers organization). He also served as an advisor for the Documenta 12’s Magazine Project. He has ben guest researcher at the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. He teaches at the Academy of Art in Carrara.

Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (2014)

@amaliaulman via Instagram

In 2014 Amalia Ulman started “Excellences & Perfections,” a four month durational performance taking place directly on her personal Instagram. In “Excellences & Perfections” Amalia Ulman fabricated a fictional character whose story unfolded in three different episodes.

The three different episodes was acting as a cute girl then as a sugar babe then as a life goddess (fashion and style blogger). “The idea was to bring fiction to a platform that has been designed for supposedly “authentic” behavior, interactions and content. The intention was to prove how easy an audience can be manipulated through the use of mainstream archetypes and characters they’ve seen before.” 

The narrative which unfolded over the course of the performance was: “The provincial girl moves to the big city, wants to be a model, wants money, splits up with her high-school boyfriend, wants to change her lifestyle, enjoys singledom, runs out of money because she doesn’t have a job, because she is too self-absorbed in her narcissism, she starts going on seeking-arrangement dates, gets a sugar daddy, gets depressed, starts doing more drugs, gets a boob job because her sugar daddy makes her feel insecure about her body, and also he pays for it, she goes through a breakdown, redemption takes place, the crazy bitch apologizes, the dumb blonde turns brunette and goes back home. Probably goes to rehab, then she is grounded at her family house.”

It’s more than a satire,” she explains. “I wanted to prove that femininity is a construction, and not something biological or inherent to any woman. Women understood the performance much faster than men. They were like, ‘We get it – and it’s very funny.’ ” What was the joke? “The joke was admitting how much work goes into being a woman and how being a woman is not a natural thing. It’s something you learn.”…

In this respect, Ulman was following in the footsteps of important older artists who have explored the fluid nature of female identity, from the 20th-century French photographer Claude Cahun to the American Cindy Sherman.

Yet, from the beginning, Ulman knew that she should stage her performance online. She wanted to play with the conventions of Instagram, such as labelling images with hashtags.

“The idea was to experiment with fiction online using the language of the internet,” she explains, “rather than trying to adapt old media to the internet, as has been done with mini-series on YouTube. The cadence and rhythm were totally different.”

Artist Bio from Artsy

Through a diverse mix of painting, sculpture, installations, smart phone apps, actions, and lectures, Amalia Ulman explores the links between consumerism and identity, class, gender, and taste. “Commodities and their arrangement define humans,” she once explained. “Staring at objects, trends, and aesthetics, I get to understand contemporary lifestyles more than by talking to people…” She is especially interested in what she calls a “bland” or “middlebrow” aesthetic, characterized by greeting cards, domestic items and ornamentation, plastic surgery, clothing, and other products that both shape notions and serve as the trappings of luxury, beauty, and the ideal lifestyle. In a sweeping installation titled Babyfootprints Crowsfeet (2014), for example, Ulman wryly commented on the idealization of motherhood and femininity, fatherhood and masculinity, and parent-child relationships by mashing up kitschy products and sentiments with darker texts and images about sex, anxiety, and inequality.

Argentine, b. 1989, Buenos Aires, Argentina, based in London and Gijón, Spain.

Carla Gannis, artwork: Until the End of the World (2017)

 Video Documentation:
Until the End of the World, Carla Gannis, 2017

“Until the End of the World” connects and amplifies narrative components threaded throughout Gannis’s Selfie Drawings project theselfiedrawings.com/, and is inspired by a sequence in the 1991 Wim Wenders film “Until the End of the World” where a woman is addicted to watching her dreams in a small, handheld device.

Press Release from Until the End of the World by Carla Gannis:

The ancient Greek term “persona” describes how an actor’s voice sounds through his mask while playing a role. In the word’s contemporary usage, a persona is the virtual identity created to represent us in the context of a social web – the invisible glue that ties us all together. So, In a society where all social, economic, and cultural systems — seem to run on software, it’s fascinating that the Greek theatre coined a word, which still plays an important role in the today’s attempts to understand our self-perceptions.

In the early 1990s Gannis shifted away from traditional paintings to producing digital print and multi-media installations. Since then, her work “examines the narrativity of 21st century representational technologies and questions the hybrid nature of identity, where virtual and real physical embodiments of self diverge and intersect.”

Gannis’s work does not just gain historicity with her paraphrases of masterpieces such as Courbets “Origin of the World” but in how she persistently constantly challenges our perceptions of femininity, identity and aesthetics.

For the DAM exhibition, Gannis provides new hybrid transcriptions of the Selfie project, including her augmented reality wallpaper installation “The Selfie Wallpaper” and the 3D animated video work “Until the End of the World,” for which the exhibition is eponymously titled and which enhances a narrative component to the selfie project. Inspired by a sequence in the 1991 Wim Wenders film “Until the End of the World” where a woman is addicted to watching her dreams in a small, handheld device, Gannis explodes the concept into an operatic mash up that addresses the digital identity politics of our age.

“The Selfie-Drawings”, the term is paradoxical in itself, is a collection of 52 digital drawings that the artist completed over 52 weeks. From January to December 2015, she concentrated intensely on “the self” through digital or analog drawings and their dissemination via social media platforms. These pieces of work consequently informed the video installation project “A Subject Self-Defined” and were later on expanded into augmented reality experiences.

Not only is the artist’s face shown but the technical devices used in order to take her selfies. Since one can assume that every viewer is aware of the technocultural conditions surrounding Gannis’s process the work should be understood as a conscious interplay between portraitist, portrait and the camera itself. Gannis added another level of reflection by publishing “The Selfie-Drawings” as a physical book. The readers can hover over the static drawings using the Blippar App to experience a new dynamic 3D reality on their phones, a revification of the static book experience.

We can’t help but wonder, how much of Carla Gannis persona is sounding through her selfies?

Carla Gannis Bio:

Carla Gannis, originally from Oxford, North Carolina, today lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA in painting from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In the late 1990s she began to incorporate digital technologies into her work, and in 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts. Currently she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.

Gannis identifies as a visual storyteller. With the use of 21st Century representational technologies she narrates through a “digital looking glass” where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency emerge. She is fascinated by digital semiotics and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of real and virtual. 

Since 2003 Gannis’s work has appeared in over 20 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally.  Her most recent solo exhibitions include “A Subject Self-Defined” at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; “The Garden of Earthly Delights” at The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY and at Kasia Kay Art Projects in Chicago, IL, 2014. In 2013 she collaborated with poet Justin Petropoulos on a transmedia book, installation and net art project entitled <legend>   </legend>  published by Jaded Ibis Press, Seattle, WA and exhibited at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.  Recent group exhibitions include “Porn to Pizza – Domestic Clichés” at DAM Gallery, in Berlin Germany and “Beautiful Interfaces” at Reverse Gallery, New York, NY.

Features on her work have appeared in ARTnewsThe Creators ProjectThe Huffington PostWiredBuzzfeedFastCo, HyperallergicArt F CityArt CriticalArt Report, The Wallstreet JournalThe New York Timesand The LA Times, among others. Recently her speculative fiction was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press. Her recent speaking engagements include “Let’s Get Digital” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and “Cogency in the Imaginarium” at Cooper Union and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in numerous panels on the intersections between art, technology, education and networked culture.

Artist Statement: 

My work examines the narrativity of 21st century representational technologies and reveals the hybrid nature of identity, where virtual and real embodiments of self diverge and intersect.  I feel akin to past and contemporary artists and writers who uncannily deconstruct rigid notions of reality and perception. The extension of this sensibility with computer-based applications is only natural to me as a reflection upon the Digital Age in which we all coexist.

My work is informed by art history, technology, theory, cinema, video games, and speculative fiction, to name a few, and I have expressed my ideas through many mediums, including digital painting, animation, 3D printing, drawing, video projection, interactive installation, performance, and net art. However, my core fascinations, with the nature(s) and politics of identity, were established during my childhood in North Carolina. I draw inspiration from my Appalachian grandparents singing dark mountain ballads about human frailty, my future-minded father working in computing, and my politicized Southern Belle of a mother wearing elaborate costumes, performing her prismatic female identity.

First and foremost, I am a storyteller, rooted in Southern Gothic and expanded into “Internet Gothic,” where I have re-focused my narratives through 21st Century representational technologies. With digital collage and remix I reveal the hybrid nature of identity, where virtual and real embodiments of self diverge and intersect. I invite viewers to experience our inescapably mediated lives “through a digital looking glass” where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency often emerge. I am fascinated by contemporary modes of digital communication, the power (and sometimes the perversity) of popular iconography, and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of technological virtuality and biological reality.  Humor and absurdity are important elements in building my nonlinear narratives, and layers upon layers of history are embedded in even my most future focused works.

On a conceptual and technical level the tableaus I produce consist of fragments that are reassembled at oblique angles to their original context — mixing the language of Bosch with the language of Emoji (and the language of Carla Gannis) for example, or combining Photoshop® and Maya® with (H)and(D)rawing® and (P)ainting®. My thoughts, embodied irl and url, are not meant to convey logical conclusions or to allow for easy categorization. I feel akin to past and contemporary artists, filmmakers and writers who uncannily deconstruct rigid notions of reality and perception. The extension of this sensibility with computer-based applications is only natural to me as a reflection upon the Digital Age in which we all coexist.


(Adapted from Randall Packer’s Social Networks – Digital Identity )

Micro-Project

Micro-Project 6: A Day in the Life of Super-Participation

Friendster Friday by Ian Aleksander

 

Each group of 4 to 5 students creates a Facebook page where they share everything they do for a 24-hour period, including school activity, meals, online media, music, location, parties.

Students comment on each other’s post. Ideally this project will be carried out during the recess for maximum super-participation.

Write an OSS post describing the results of the micro-project, examining the kinds of things that were shared, whether they were personal, trivial, intellectual, etc. Assign category “Micro_Project”.

Also examine the motivation behind super-participation, and how it becomes an extension and expression of our digital identity. Do we try to create a persona or image of ourselves through the things that we share via social media?

Readings

Reading

Wittkower, D. E. (2010). “Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on your Mind? A Reply to Facebook Critics,” Popular Culture & Philosophy

Symposium

Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium

We will go over the schedule for the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium, in which each student will attend, participate and write about two of the three days. I would like everyone to attend day 1 and either day 2 or 3. See times below.

There will be no regular class on Monday of that week. However, students can sign up for Final Project consultation slots during our Week 10 Monday scheduled hours (4:30pm – 7:30pm).

Next week we will have a detailed review of the Symposium Hyperessay, a more extended writing assignment based on Symposium keynotes and performances, and the concept of distributed, networked dialogue that takes place in the third space.

Everyone will attend online via Adobe Connect Webconferencing
To Login: https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/thirdspacenetwork/
Select “Guest,” type your name, “Enter Room”

Schedule @ a Glance:

Day 1: March 29 – ADM (8pm-11pm)
Keynote by Maria Chatzichristodoulou
Internet Performance by Annie Abrahams and collaborators

Day 2: March 30 – LASALLE College of the Arts (8pm-11pm)
Keynote by Matt Adams, co-founder of Blast Theory

Day 3: March 31 – School of the Art Institute of Chicago (11pm-2am)
Internet Performance by Jon Cates and collaborators

Next week we will be using Adobe Connect, be sure to bring your laptops.