Given the complexity and scale of cultural networks today, as well as the accelerating pace with which they arise, metamorphize, and crumble, it has become increasingly difficult to trace and comprehend the ways in which media absorbs and programs our identities and social behaviours. Opting out is no longer a viable navigational strategy but instead a near impossibility; the ubiquity of the screen ensures its diverse structures will touch (directly, indirectly) even the most radical self-styled luddites. My work in various forms of new media thus chiefly preoccupies itself with delineating the shifting architecture at play in our protean media ecology in order to ask if this architecture can be retooled to labour against its own oppressive tendencies.
In years past, this meant focusing on untangling my own ambivalent relationship to cinema, a relationship that began at a young age with an insatiable appetite for the consumption of films. Though I might not have been able to articulate it then, I’m certain that the bittersweet quality of the light and sound streaming into my dark basement, its commanding and overwhelming and confusing presence, was what intoxicated me and eventually led to obsessive analysis. I studied media theory in college, writing most frequently on narrative and what I came to see as its tyrannical hegemony over desire. But by the same hand, I was making artwork that attempted to reclaim my beloved cinema, experimenting with the idea that I might be able to distill classical film’s more generative aspects – its piercing affect, its electric thrills and jolts – without inhabiting its original limiting strictures. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, I wanted to unfurl desire to its full potential. I appropriated visual, aural, and textual elements from movies, filtering them through recorders, glass, software, and redeploying them in an unruly fashion, outside of their primary context (in a sculpture, say, rather than a blockbuster). I was a mad scientist, testing whether my procedural inventions weirded or did not weird their source, allowed or did not allow cinematic devices the right circumstances to take off and take on new valences. My hypotheses, to be sure, were not always correct. Nevertheless, my curiosity drove me forward.
As I have honed my methods and understanding regarding narrative film, and as the “Information Age” has filled out its own skin, my concerns have expanded and my sight been retrained. My work, though, still retains this basic need to illuminate the ligature supporting and propelling the technology we use to interpret our realities, such that it might be cut or readjusted, opened up. Recent video, sculpture, and installation work has concentrated on Instagram, a social media application with close to a billion active users that has occasionally acted as an oasis for me as well as aroused fiery, disorienting furies. In 2016, I began conducting disciplined play with the platform that served to educate me on the character of my engagement with the app. The first steps of the information-gathering process included making and sharing a series of animated videos following my Instagram tag through imagined spaces (called “instaventures”), as well as the creation of my piece #gardenenvy. This online “installation” (@hashtaggardenenvy) consists of a series of posts arranged into the shape of a window, which unfolds into a succession of explorations on the illusory quality of selfhood as constructed on Instagram. Each of these works presents a distinct point of view, all equally plausible, on what it may mean to partake of Instagram. They also offered me an opportunity to begin to the transform the torrent of piqued emotions inside of me into articulations, to feel out the application’s and our assumptions about digital life, and to brainstorm other strategies for unwinding these articles of faith.
What I have been meditating on of late as a result of this learning is how easily we are subsumed by capitalist complexes when we allow ourselves to believe we are expressing our individuality and/or connecting to one another as sovereign individuals. When a modicum of agency or the mere possibility of alliance is dangled before our eyes, we are so desperate for acknowledgement and love, so alienated from one another that we become compliant, willing to hand over huge parts of ourselves for rearrangement in some unknown corporate monument, for little in return other than the chance to participate. Though many of us media-savvy cyber citizens know we are subject to Instagram’s grid, their system of organizing photos into accounts and profiles, their algorithmic feed, their particular palette of options, their servers full of data, and the advertisements for which they provide real estate, somehow we still cling to the notion that the content we produce and the way we use the app is the sole prerogative of the user and not the company or synchronous and related forces, that we thereby have control over our own image in the space of the platform, and that we maintain that control when we exit the app. I suspect this is related to our consistent willingness to avow a firm boundary between the corporeal and the wireless. For as long as the online world is mentally cordoned off in a separate zone where earthly rules don’t apply, its abstraction cushions denial and functions as an excuse and justification for all kinds of conduct. But these realms are not independent of one another. The social codes that prevail online matter…as in, materially. Our activities “there” bleed into our face-to- face relationships “here,” and have a concrete, fleshly, bodily impact, just as a body’s impact on a phone can send a wave of energy coursing through the ether.
The two projects on which I am currently working aim to tease out this experiential overlap between physical and virtual existence using divergent approaches. The first utilizes the infrastructure of Instagram rather straightforwardly, but makes a single content-based substitution that reveals aspects of the network by short-circuiting it. I hollow out what is usually at the center of popular genres of photography on Instagram (baby pictures, lifestyle-blog-esque features, sexy fashion snaps), replacing the human subject with “human body part brick” sculptures I have made, rectalinear and highly abstracted versions of the anatomical fragments on which they are based. The failure of the bricks to become transformed by this simple gesture into anything other than an obdurate brick foregrounds the hallucinatory promises of mobilization and activation made by Instagram. In the same instance that we glimpse the deception at the heart of technology’s emotional pull, though, we also observe how effective that fraudulent power to derealize reality can be on a daily basis, how much the biological can bend to the will of the Internet.
The other project – The internet weighs the same as a strawberry – draws attention to the meaning created in the back and forth between one’s phone and the “organic” domain, and alters the user’s engagement with the social media site. It uses data stemming from interaction with a fictional profile that attendees are asked to peruse to alter sculptures in the gallery space where the guests are situated. Neither the posts on the profile nor the art objects alone create the significance of the work; insight is born from their relationship to one another. The meaning produced becomes a conduit to an experience of the world as a gradient in which matter and the virtual are combined, not in neat binary opposition to one another. “Likes” are no longer an indication of support or attraction, an end in themselves, but become a part of a game that stimulates questions around the tactile consequences of online operations. They become a reminder of the weight of virtuality.