top of page

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. 

bottom of page