Artists Network-Ed: How Social Media Is Changing Art And Vice Versa
“Every age has its own gait, glance and gesture.” Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1860.
Since the birth of web 2.0 in the early 2000s, interactivity has become the key to the construction of content and virtual networks. In this sense, culture and network find fertile ground for symbolic and symbiotic mutations in the web. Nowadays, can we think of a net without art and art without a net? How do artistic languages evolve within social networks? The terms «social media» and «social network» are often used synonymously. However, in their relationship with artistic creation, ‘media’ and ‘network’ are not exactly the same thing. In this context ‘social network’ constitutes the set of relationships between content and users on the web. The nature of the network could be both on and offline. On the other hand, the definition of «social media» highlights the nature of the web as a medium, as the device which supports virtual networks. In this sense, online social networks need social media to exist on the web. Following this idea, social media allows for social networking. How do contemporary artists critique, steal, and use social media and networks? How are artistic production and distribution changing in an increasingly networked era?
Art as a Network, Network as a Medium
The emergence of the first online content streaming platforms immediately became an opportunity for artistic creation and reflection on the digital medium.
Artists such as Petra Cortright are well aware of this and propose projects dealing with the aesthetic and social dimension of the internet as a social media and network. Cortright’s first works use the aesthetic canons of Youtube, and in particular of the cam-girl genre, to distort them and overturn their meaning. In VVEBCAM (2007), the artist presents herself as an alternative cam-girl, who does not wink at her viewers but remains focused on the camera and visual effects, immersed in the graphic interface of the video platform. Deceiving the internet audience in vague search of explicit content, the artist appropriates spam keywords to betray the viewer’s expectations. Cortright uses Youtube and the webcam as a tool for artistic production and subversion of the media and social order of the platform. Through her work, she emphasizes a new perception of identity in the condition of the online user, the communal nature of online networks, and the redefinition and fluidity of private and public space on the web. Parallel to Petra Cortright, Gazira Babeli has been living and working as an artist, performer and film-maker in Second Life. Babeli joined the first native artistic community in Second Life “Odyssey”, and in April 2007 she staged on this same platform an exhibition entitled [Collateral Damage] (2007), which has been — virtually — visited by over one thousand people.
Today we are witnessing a true proliferation of virtual art experiences, and the art world is increasingly embracing network culture. Art in and for social networks meets the birth of a critical look at the digital, the new tools of artistic creation and the community dimension of the network, the new hub of the creative process, but not only. Social networking also becomes an opportunity to demonstrate a new way of understanding the artist. The net often corresponds for artists to the space of inspiration, creation and communication. The 5th Floor, the online space of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, presented at the beginning of March Domenico Quaranta’s curatorial project Studio Visit, which allows you to peek inside the computers of James Bridle, Petra Cortright, Aria Dean, Oliver Laric, Eva & Franco Mattes and Lu Yang. The artists film their screen during their research and creation work and offer us the chance to poke around inside the programs, emails and files they consult. The sharing of their creative intimacy brings into play a new paradigm of measurement of private and public, where the ethics of social networking tends to overexpose personal content. The computer, software and hardware, embodies the new artistic atelier.
“Instagram’s logically simple structure […] make us realize the older mediums we are used to discussing as singular entities are really just fictions of our historicizing imagination.” Lev Manovich, Instagram and Contemporary Image, 2017
From Self to Selfie
While the web and online social networking platforms offer the possibility to experiment beyond the constraints of traditional media, the use of social networking platforms presupposes compliance with other policies regarding form and content. The emergence of contemporary social networks has immediately highlighted new conditions for the content and ownership of the images we share online. For this reason, the constitution of a virtual self (users and avatars made out of data) points out the need to reflect on the new nature of identity in the digital world.
Far from corresponding to a pure and transparent representation of the self, the user in social networks corresponds to a kaleidoscope of information, including images, dates, places and comments become the raw material for social profile management proper to each platform. In this sense, social media becomes a way of questioning the physical and virtual identity of an individual/user. In this scenario, our digital self is ruled by complex, hidden and constantly evolving algorithms, which have the power to enhance or censor content.
How do artists approach the problem of online self-representation? How does online popularity challenge both the social representation of the self and informational capitalism?
In April 2014, Amalia Ulman started a scripted online performance via her Instagram and Facebook profiles. The artist underwent a semi-fictional self makeover by documenting plastic surgery, extreme diets and random fashionable activities. Through a close study of the social algorithm, she deliberately adhered to the canons of excellence and perfection favoured by social networks (hence the name of the project: Excellences and Perfections). Ulman’s work highlights the marked aestheticization of everyday life through social networks, the tendency to overshare moments of intimacy, joy or pain. For the artist, the social network becomes the ideal stage for a distortedly perfect self.
Around Amalia Ulman’s work, in her article “The Theatre of the Selfie: Fictive Practices of the Instagram Artist” researcher Sara Sylvestre writes that: “In a world where presentation of the self-performed through ‘selfies’ have become everyday expressions, portrayal of the Self is being redefined by contemporary feminist artists. Building upon the legacy of artists such as Hannah Wilke, Lyn Hershman Leeson and Cindy Sherman a new generation of feminist artists through technology and particularly social media continue to explore gendered representations of the body by using their own bodies in their creative process.”
“The new feminism must be a form of stealth feminism.” Leah Schrager
Can the appropriation of the creative and technological dynamics of social networks correspond to a new (cyber) feminist instrument? Sylvestre adds that: «The artists in this research use their own bodies and those of others in order to express individual and particular cultural positions as a fictional persona, namely that of the artist.» Staging and manipulating online self-representations become for the artist a way to explore and criticize the mainstream media representation of the female body.
Similarly to Ulman, artist Leah Schrager plays with her digital alter ego, Ona Artist, questioning the very notions of identity and fetishization of online images. Through her ongoing performance, Schrager explores themes of sexuality, identity and self-representation via social networks. Appropriating the canons of contemporary web celebrities, the artist investigates the limits of appropriateness and inappropriateness of female images, using social networks as a platform for showcasing her fictional self but also as a medium of artistic creation.
Social networks are today more than ever, the cross and delight of artists and art institutions. Working on and with social networks means taking note of the economic policies and aesthetic limits that these platforms offer, but also of the virtual possibilities of artistic creation and distribution.
What’s next? Digital Art (Un)filtered
The very high degree of accessibility to content on social networks allows for possible artistic democratization and a break from traditional institutional artistic canons. Social networks are often the cradle of new artistic proposals, which intersect design, fashion and digital creation. Artists such as Ines Alpha and Andy Picci are paradigmatic example of how a new generation of artists emerges and feeds on the culture of social networks. Through the creation of filters and AR works, born-digital artists play with 3D modelling on and beyond the screen. On the border between the photographic and the virtual, artistic creation through and for social media embodies an idea of art as a process, interaction and virtuality as an expressive possibility. From Youtube to Second Life, passing through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and all of their ancestors, artists on social networks is committed to the appropriation of codes of network culture and highlights their artistic agency on the border between private and public information, between the intimate and the collective, between the virtuality and the materiality of digital media. The artistic creation and diffusion through social networks enhance digital performativity in a virtual and networked art world.
