Hello,
Here’s your one link wonder:
I wanted to share this last week but Depoorter’s YouTube video got pulled down due to copyright issues.
I had mixed reactions to the work. Initially I thought it was invasive. Surveillance, conducted without the consent of the people in the footage. Somehow that feeling went away when I learned that they were posing for Instagram pictures. I found myself feeling that they had waived their right to privacy by publicly posting the photo. I don’t know if I could defend that reaction logically, the opinion emerged from me at the speed of a bias. Was I just justifying the fact that I kept looking?
Finally, a sense of exhaustion set in.
Conveying their staged happiness — or in some of the cases, their attempts at cool detachment — just seemed to be so arduous. Dozens of photos taken. Limbs shifting mechanically between poses. Reviews, disappointment, shakes of the head, suggestions, costume changes, retakes…
All of that, for a picture of yourself drinking a pint of cider in Temple Bar, or flashing a peace sign at the baseball?
On one level this is just techno tinkering from Depoorter. It’s interesting (and scary) to see what can be run up with a few hours to spare, a rudimentary understanding of APIs and some coding experience.
There’s a deeper message however. Using code, the artist has separated the subjects from their environment and invites us to respond to them in that new framing. As we watch them jockeying and shuffling awkwardly we learn something about them. Their secret slips out. We learn much more than we did from their single, highly-polished image. And, when we see images like these in the future we’ll know more about those too. We won’t take them at face value, because we’ve seen all the effort they expended trying to make things look effortless.
It’s ironic perhaps that the only question I had for these appearance-obsessed people was if they had any idea what they looked like…
Maybe I’m just old, but seeing these performative figures crystallized my feelings about social media, and the damage it so casually causes to our self-esteem.
Until next time, let’s be careful out there.