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CONTENT AWARE (Working title)

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Examining the relationship between Art & Content in a Socially Networked World

Provisional research goal.

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Beyond Media/New Media Art? 

(Above) an ongoing 2 way exchange: artists creating social specific content  / artists appropriating social content to produce art. 

Is content changing our expectations of art? 

Can all the art we publish online effectively be considered ‘content’ and to what extent is the opposite true?

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My background

Exploring the the relationship between art and content feels like a natural area of study to me - I initially worked as a magazine editor before later moving on into creative/art direction. During the transition between these 2 work roles came a period where I contributed thematic photo essays based around online visual cultures to various magazines and art journals, which began stimulating my impulse to pursue an art practice independent of my client focussed work. 

I consider my work to be primarily an ‘internet aware’ (often self-referentially so) from of digital concept art, and one overarching topic I am interested in exploring in the practical side of the course is how to present my work in ‘real’/physical terms, and exploring the validity (or not) of doing so.

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Previous Work sample 1: Collaborative photographic project, examining online ‘performances of the self’ and aiming to portray online personalities as their ‘digital identities’. Using hyper-real imagery to exaggerate their digital personas and incorporating references to commercial/advertising languages to emphasise the particpants ‘personal brand’.  

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Previous Work sample 2: ‘I Love Your Feed’ a chronological video sequence composed of 3 years of my Instagram ‘Likes’ between 2013-2016. A self reflective study considering whether the material we choose to interact with creates a ‘shadow self’ that offers a truer representation of who we really are than a forward facing, networked self defined by the material we choose to broadcast and publish online.

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Practical Work

The primary conceptual interest for my practical work is in producing pieces based around screen-grabbed images, and, amongst other things, examining whether photos taken within a screen can share approaches, and be imbued with the same meaning as, those taken outside of them (or more generally, compared to works produced by more ‘hands on’, autonomous means), and how these works might interact with the Art/Content dynamic of my research.

I am also very interested in the illustrative properties of screengrabs as media, and the way we often use them as a shorthand way of showing people things.

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A selection of contemporary screenshot orientated works by other artists (Richard Prince, dontsave, Tae in Ahn, Jon Rafman).

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Screengrab tests 1: A small selection of digital landscapes/environment screengrabbed while watching the Disney Film ‘Frozen’. These were taken during moments of the film where no characters or obvious references to the film were present in an attempt to conduct a form of ‘internal’ landscape photography. The purpose of this series was primarily experimental, to explore the role screen capture processes might play in my work, as well as assessing the extent the images might take on a new/different meanings when appropriated from their original context.

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Within the screenshots concept I am also interested in the idea of creating digital ‘Time Capsules’ (loosely based on Warhols ‘Time Capsule’ boxes) compiled of the screenshots I take on my phone on a day to day basis. The idea for the piece is that I would compile all these images in an encrypted Zip Folder every month. The password for each folder would then be set to be emailed to their respective owner at a random date between 25-100 years. This would serve as a follow up to the self-audit style ‘I Love Your Feed’ video piece, as well as functioning as a way of organising, and - by doing so - attempting to make sense of, the relentless avalanche of information we experience online, and the increasing absurdity of the content we are subjected to (as well as intending to reflect this kind of era-specific online media - and my interpretation of it - to viewers who might unzip the folders in the future).

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Other topics...

Other topics I will be considering within my work include: Art in the Age of Digital Reporduction, Copywright, (Digital) Ethics, Online Performance, Appropriation, Fair use Law, Alex Bag, Privacy, Jon Rafman, Barthes, The Pictures Generation (and parallels with internet orientated work), Cory Arcangel, democratisation of creativity, The Jogging, Richard Prince, how the internet influences our expectations of images, Andy Warhol, do social networks fulfil pop arts proposition of removing barriers between high & low culture?, Amalia Ulman, The Networked Self, Theresa M. Senft etc etc etc....