Summation of Life (Detail) –Part 2
Presented for the exhibition Same/Everything curated by Tom Smith at Firstdraft, 2016
For this performance, I spent months trawling Instagram via hashtag searches, screenshotting and organising thousands of posts to create a slideshow depicting new standardised visual languages (and their underlying emotional taxonomies) emerging across certain parts of the globe as a result of rapid-uptake of the social image-sharing app.
This performance worked in counterpoint to Summation of Life (Detail) Part 1, a film that uses predictive text and stock footage to present uncannily familiar human experiences. Presented together, these two works – one generated with predictive technologies and the other generated by humans and organised via an automated archiving system – make visible the electronic infrastructures that frame our thoughts, feelings and actions, bringing into question notions of creative agency, emotional authenticity and the feedback loops that constitute our identities.
