Lunch Bytes (33): Life - Representation, Visibility Online and the Self

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• published: 19 Jan 2015
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Foam, 30 November 2014 Panel discussion with Geert Lovink, media the­o­rist, Am­s­ter­dam; Kathrin Pe­ters, pro­fes­sor for vi­sual cul­ture stud­ies at the Uni­ver­sity of the Arts, Berlin; Willem Pope­lier, artist, Utrecht and Amalia Ulman, artist, Los An­ge­les/Lon­don/Gijon Mod­er­ated by Mar­cel Feil, Deputy Di­rec­tor of artis­tic af­fairs Foam and Melanie Bühler, cu­ra­tor Lunch Bytes The 'selfie' – fa­mously named Ox­ford Dic­tio­nar­ies' in­ter­na­tional word of the year 2013 – is prob­a­bly the most pop­u­lar pho­to­graphic genre on­line. This phe­nom­e­non not only re­flects how in­ti­mate we have be­come with our smart phones, but also il­lus­trates the gen­eral ob­ses­sion with rep­re­sent­ing our selves to both friends and strangers on so­cial media plat­forms like Face­book or In­sta­gram. As we spend an in­creas­ing amount of time on­line and many of our so­cial re­la­tions are ini­ti­ated, ne­go­ti­ated, and main­tained in dig­i­tal lo­cales, we cul­ti­vate our dig­i­tal iden­tity ac­cord­ingly. So­cial plat­forms urge us to com­plete our pro­files, spec­ify our re­la­tion­ships with our friends, and tell the world what's on our mind, while ag­gre­gat­ing this in­for­ma­tion to es­tab­lish a de­tailed pic­ture of who we are – or who our click stream data says we are. With the user-friendly in­ter­con­nect­ed­ness of today's web, which en­ables us to buy books on Ama­zon with our Face­book ac­count and keeps us in­formed about the prod­ucts our friends have rec­om­mended, our dif­fer­ent pro­files grad­u­ally merge and our on­line iden­tity be­comes in­creas­ingly ho­mo­ge­neous, trans­par­ent and mar­ketable. In less than a decade, the cor­po­rate web has rad­i­cally di­min­ished the in­ter­net's once-lauded ca­pac­ity for fos­ter­ing iden­tity play and anony­mous so­cial ex­per­i­men­ta­tion. Now that Cy­ber­space is dead, con­stant iden­ti­fi­ca­tion seems in­evitable. This Lunch Bytes event looks at how on­line iden­ti­ties are con­structed by users and cor­po­ra­tions alike. It ad­dresses the per­va­sive im­per­a­tive of shar­ing and being per­sonal, as well as so­cial media's con­stant crav­ing for im­ages ded­i­cated to the or­di­nary and the pri­vate. It asks why we want to be so promi­nently vis­i­ble on­line and what kind of vi­sual gen­res for self-rep­re­sen­ta­tion have emerged. Fur­ther­more, it ex­am­ines if and how these gen­res are in­debted to older forms of pho­to­graphic (self)rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The event in­vites artists who have re­flected the topic of dig­i­tal iden­tity in their work and asks them how they pre­sent them­selves as artists in on­line en­vi­ron­ments. It raises the ques­tion if rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent rep­re­sen­ta­tions of one self are still pos­si­ble and if the dream of con­struct­ing a new iden­tity on­line, per­tain­ing to the early days of the web, is over.