final project iteration and context brief.

I have been studying the way we receive, transmit, and recollect personal information through social online media. My perspective can be summarized by taking into account two opposite, but mutually relevant views on narration and memory: “to actively forget [and in this instance, re-create] the past in order to overcome the instincts of resentment” (Nietzche) and an understanding that 'to remember everything is a form of madness' (Brian Friel).

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 work, 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. The ideas of artifact, memory and process are identified and elaborated in thematically relevant artistic expression.

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).