New Visualities, New Technologies by J. Macgregor Wise Hille Koskela

Author:J. Macgregor Wise, Hille Koskela [J. Macgregor Wise, Hille Koskela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472404435
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Photoshopping: The Art Practice and Social Media Nexus

With the growth in networked and localized visualities from iPhone applications such as hipstamatic—that deploy professional photography effects to fuse the digital with the analogue affect—to locative media like Google Goggles, Foursquare, and Jiepang, we are witnessing erosion between simplistic amateur versus professional divisions. These applications highlight that the context for examining creative practice has dramatically altered in a number of ways that are intimate and vernacular, as they are socio-cultural and geographic, in nature. These intimate publics take the form of emergent cartographies that overlay the geographic and physical space onto an electronic position and relational presence, which is emotional and social. Writing before the onset of social media, Lauren Berlant observed that intimacy has taken on new geographies and forms of mobility, most notably as a kind of ‘publicness’ (1998). As intimacy gets negotiated within networked social media, the publicness—along with the continuous, multitasking full-timeness—of intimacy becomes increasingly tangible. They are now intimate publics. As social, locative and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, how is this impacting upon art practice and politics? How are these new models for engagement, distribution and participation change the way art is practiced?

As social media becomes no longer avoidable in the literacies of everyday life it is increasingly important that practitioners grapple with such media whether they are media savvy or not. Despite this feature of contemporary life, there seems to be segregations within the artworld about the role and necessity of media like Facebook. The deployment of social media, that transfers the personal and intimate into social semi-publics, not only highlights the growing significance of the local in informing the fabric of the internet but also creates new types of performativity that further erode work-leisure divisions or what Melissa Gregg defines as “presence bleed” (2011). That is, a bleed of identities, performativities and labor across platforms, media and contexts.

Some artists are productively using Facebook to send out invitations, others are using it to perform a type of public intimacy in which messages, photos and newsfeeds all catalogue and cultivate the image (and aura) of the artist. For this breed of social media literates, vehicles such as Facebook provide a centralized way to coordinate events, activities, identity, expression and networks. Within this oeuvre of twenty-first-century art ‘produsers’ there are also those who use Facebook as just another informational source that they harvest from but rarely contribute to. Then there are those that have perhaps channeled obsessive predilections—continuously updating, commenting and engaging with the plethora of newsfeed and media content everyday. One kind of user regularly changes their profile photo and update status to reflect their mood and experiences, the former rarely engages in such an activity (if at all!). And then there is an in between space … where most of the users actually reside. Or pretend to.

These cartographies of intimate publics are marked within the visual artworld as it grapples with its place in light of emergent networked or what Jean Burgess calls ‘situated creativity’ (2008).

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