Here and Nowhere: Artistic Identity on Social Media
I come from nowhere
And you should go there
Just try it for a while
The people from nowhere always smile (1)
SOCIAL MEDIA IS A DOMINANT FORCE in contemporary art and culture. It is a network that attempts to incorporate everything into it. Its excessive extent is founded on consensus, of sharing all with all at all times. The unprecedented dominance and popularity of various forms of social media among artists suggests they have finally escaped their traditional identity as alienated individuals. Or have they? Could it be instead that contemporary artists’ unquestioning reliance on social media has effectively alienated them from themselves? Through compulsive engagement with social media, artists increasingly treat their identities as ‘things’, images and commodities to be traded. Artists have become subjects of their own continual self-surveillance and conscious or unconscious self- marketing. At the same time, this type of surveillance is augmented and encouraged by the constant ‘personalised’ surveillance of major corporations like Google and Facebook (2). The question raised by the contemporary ubiquity of social media as a phenomenon that is both everywhere and nowhere, is not a traditionalist one of the ‘real’ versus the ‘fake’. What really is in question is the fostering of types of instantaneous aesthetic experiences that are completely devoid, discouraging even, of the distancing necessary for art to be conceived as a philosophic-critical undertaking. Social media increasingly prefigure contemporary art as a vehicle for highly individualised self- endorsement. The artist perpetually appears for the sake of appearing and is seemingly happier for this fact. That is not to say that critical attitudes or genuinely interesting art is unrepresented in the world of social media. They clearly are not. Still in the smooth nowhere land of the Internet, and especially via explicitly image-generating social media platforms like Instagram, contemporary art is frequently encountered foremost as branded merchandise or fleeting ahistorical entertainment. Except now this entertainment forever merges with glimpses of the artist’s ‘real’ life. This too is presented as a brand that the solo artist seeks to capitalise on (3). Indeed in the instant self-generating universe of social media the artist’s online persona, a doppelgänger-like cipher, rules supreme.
Through much of modern history, artists were habitually viewed as alienated individuals par-excellence. From the late 19th Century, the era of the peintre maudit (4), through most of the 20th, the identity of the artist (at least in the West) came to coalesce around images of an ultra-individualist set apart from the rest of society. The artist observed society in a critical light while frequently adopting attitudes and lifestyles distasteful to the bourgeoisie. The rise of Existentialism in the 1950s only heightened this sense of the artist as the quintessential individualist. He or she made life (and career) choices based on a perception of existence founded on radical ambivalence; when nothing was certain any longer it was up to the artist to willfully create their own identities and fortunes. Such fortunes might be aimed unapologetically at fame. More typically they were directed ‘critically’ and politically at socially resistant underground contexts. The advent of postmodernity during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s led to the questioning of the naturalised polarisation of mainstream and underground cultures. Postmodern discourses de-emphasised the heroic aspects of the artist’s individual struggle for recognition. Now the Self was proposed as a kind of text. The fashioning of the artist was re-imagined as partaking predominantly of stylistic and postural choices; who to quote and how, what to wear and why. Subjective authenticity was challenged by a concept of selfhood that doubted the existence of an inner-self. Instead the subject became a canvas for stylistic juxtapositions and self-conscious citations. The classic alienated artist of modernity could be assured at least, despite their often very genuine socio-economic precarity, of the authenticity of their alienation. In fact alienation was an indicator of authenticity in a mechanised, mass-mediatised world viewed intrinsically as inauthentic. In a different way, postmodern practitioners felt vindicated by their enthusiastic embrace of the traditionally inauthentic. Inauthenticity and synthetic juxtaposition were thought of, somewhat ironically, as evidence of an authentic understanding of the fundamentally ambivalent nature of selfhood on the other side of modernist idealism.
Beyond postmodern paradigms the increased consumption of art today via the Internet says a lot about the virtually networked world in which we live. Contemporary artists’ pronounced reliance on social media outlets has dramatically altered the way contemporary art is consumed more widely. Emphasis on consumption is crucial because it signifies a much broader shift within society from a culture of production to one of consumption. Indeed ‘from an artistic perspective the emergence of the Internet erased (the) difference between the production and exhibition of art’ (5). Now circulation, the continual spiraling consumption of culture, outstrips both process and production in the art world as elsewhere. This is true to such an extent that now ‘...production has... become mixed up with circulation to the point of being indistinguishable’ (6). It is arguable that percentage-wise contemporary artists spend way more time browsing instantly accessible images of work by other artists online than they do producing their own. Perhaps this is unsurprising given that social media provide a quasi-organic platform proliferating potentially endless virtual portholes through which to see and be seen. Online artists can readily expose themselves while simultaneously glimpsing the work of peers near and far. Yet in order to productively enter the immense, intensely eclectic and innately voyeuristic sphere of social media, the artist must learn its language. Fortunately social media were designed from the outset to be as accessible as possible. Their language is therefore largely intuitive. Doubly fortunate for artists, the Internet in general is heavily dependent on the language of images. Images are absolutely everywhere freely floating in the social media universe (7).
An expressly imagist social media application like Instagram has become a very successful means of propagating an image of the contemporary artist that blurs their professional and intimate lives. In fact via social media, the professional dimension of the artist’s documented output is continually interpolated by momentary glimpses into their daily lives. Previously, the self-portrait was regarded as the most powerful means of focusing attention on an individual artist’s inner life or ‘soul’. The self-portrait was meant to offer a particularly revealing glimpse of the artist as they saw themselves in their own time. The value of famous self-portraits, say by Rembrandt or Van Gogh, is dependent on this notion of their capacity to draw image and viewer into a surprisingly close dialogue with one another, one that is both unique and universal (8). Perhaps, somewhat unexpectedly, the later growth of photography, to which the language of social media is thoroughly indebted, only extended this fascination with the intimate personality of the artist. Photographic self-portraiture could collapse distance between viewer and subject even further often to discomfiting effect. This is certainly true of the self-portraiture of representative artists like Nan Goldin or Robert Mapplethorpe. Given photography’s inherent verisimilitude and comparative instantaneity it seemed even more capable of showing the ‘real’ person behind the artistic mask.
From an alternate viewpoint, an artist like Andy Warhol was one of the first to identify that the confessional photographic revelation of the artist’s ‘true self’ to an anonymous public actually obscured the impersonal way modern images were consumed in a world of mass reproduction. And this was regardless of how personal these images were. Warhol was canny and insightful enough to capitalise on his acute awareness of this situation by rendering impersonality the defining filter through which the subject was viewed. His statement that in the future everyone would have their fifteen minutes of fame deflected Warhol’s knowing and ever-increasing dedication to expanding his own celebrity. With platforms like Instagram this fifteen minutes of fame has grown to be infinite (9). The ‘selfie’ as one of the social media’s most paradigmatic and illustrative expressions, is infinitely repeatable while simultaneously infinitely diverse. The selfie apparently shows the subject, the artist included, spontaneously in their natural habitat no matter where that habitat might be. At any moment the globe-trotting practitioner might be making a point of their sudden presence in Shanghai, their appearance on a beach in India at sunset, their current creative undertakings in a state-of-the-art studio in Finland or their nonchalant strolling through the streets of Milan. The cumulative message these separate images create is one of success. The artist is successful in having the freedom to move from continent to continent, from one residency to another. They are additionally successful in being able to instantly transform such knowledge into a free-flowing pictorial narrative. This narrative is consumed on social media as if in real time.
Such a situation does not discount either that the selfie-taker might believe that he or she is simply sharing a personal instant with faraway friends. The intention of the act is practically irrelevant when the medium itself dominates (10). The telescoping framework of image-focused social media platforms structures narratives that allow both personal acquaintances and complete strangers to vicariously consume other’s ‘intimate’ moments as though they were their own. Identification occurs representationally whereby the consumer responds to the unfolding story of a certain type of person, a person who does this or that, who goes here or there, who associates with these types of people, not those. The permutations of the artist’s capacity to produce the affect of instant access to their real lives promotes a compelling illusion of who they are as much as who they want to be. Warholian fame-time is magnified exponentially becoming the means by which the myth of a personality worth ‘following’ is created. When a creative persona deemed attractive or interesting enough to follow is simultaneously linked to representations of their artistic oeuvre, then that oeuvre may assume an entirely different inflection. The subject’s self-documentation ends up entwined with documentation of their creative output both of which assume thing-like characteristics. Life is exhibited in the moment as much as art is.
The self-promoted attractiveness of the creator ‘themselves’ is now irrevocably intertwined with the aesthetic appeal of their creations. The critical ideal of the work’s primacy over the biography of the artist becomes moot; for those entering the social media network artist and artwork are no longer distinguishable. The artist is as much constructed as what they create. This allows practically anyone to formulate their own image of celebrity seemingly on their own terms. Instantaneity forever encourages our reading of such images as casual, unconstructed, frameless and genuine. Likewise, the contemporary artist’s virtual simulation of a level of success is tantamount to its actuality when instantaneous representations are consumed as truth. Social media suggest a world where fantasies can come true. Simulation is now functional not metaphoric. Concepts like success and failure have turned out to be absolutely relative. The perception of either depends on what you show and how (11). The automatic assumption that a technology like Instagram merely reiterates and documents artwork as it is made, as something of a more immediate form of a traditional website, is ultimately questionable. Because social media draws things from outside the immediate process of creation and exhibition, the artwork is now loaded with extra-artistic values. On the one hand this is an interesting phenomenon as far as it undermines concepts of a thoroughly autonomous work of art; the art exhibited on social media can never escape its embedding in a vast universe of related as well as entirely unrelated imagery. On the other hand, exposure to the real-life circumstances of an artwork’s production tends to add something of an ethical dimension to the work being viewed; this is the sort of work made by this sort of artist. On social media the old idea that you can simply ignore the personality and attitudes of the artist to focus solely on their art becomes again increasingly difficult to sustain.
The imagist dimension of much social media, enabling the artist-as-consumer to glide effortlessly from one image-verse to another, begins to encourage forms of art that appear as though tailored in advance for it. Formally, the sorts of images an application like Instagram favours, as an essentially graphic interface, are also unsurprisingly graphically orientated. The slicker, brighter, more immediately catchy the nature of an image or artwork, the more instantaneously its appeal is registered (12). The more instantly appealing the image the more ‘likes’ it generates. The more likes generated the more potential for additional followers, for a greater audience for both you and your art. Formally, an artwork’s flatness is especially appropriate to a medium like Instagram as the artwork is constantly brought into direct dialogue with the flatness of the screen. The screen in question is almost ubiquitously that of the so-called smart phone. The mobility of this inescapable contemporary technology means in a similar way that imagery exhibited on social media is frequently apprehended ‘on the run’. The viewer moves through real space at the same time as they move through the rhizomatic virtual space of the Internet. There the artwork starts to function like a target where ‘strong’ imagery dominates over ‘weak’. Artworks occupying considerable space, that rely on subtle spatial or textual effects (that might be subtle even to viewers actually present), or that incorporate complex interrelated parts, lose out to those highlighting image basics like ‘colour and design’. The designer fetish of the smart phone now folds within it the fetish of the superiorly crafted, or indifferently conceived but nonetheless, graphically striking image. Of course the video function of smart phones can illustrate the three-dimensional characteristics of artworks and such video representations are very popular. Still such video depictions frequently depend on random cropping and close-ups that rarely do justice to spatially or perceptually complex works (13). Considering Instagram’s inherent bias for flatness, it is telling that it has been specifically cited negatively in relation to the rise of a recently popular tendency in contemporary painting, Zombie Formalism (14). Zombie Formalism’s young practitioners have been explicitly criticised for their frequent dependence on feigned crudeness coupled with lusciously obvious painterly effects. Such instantly seductive aesthetic handling is particularly appreciable on social media screen space (15). Visual seduction outweighs interest in critical subtleties or testing ambiguities. Warhol’s earlier radical challenge to depth philosophy comes to the fore in the seemingly limitless though ultimately flattened terrain of social media.
The ramifications of social media impact on the constructed presence of artistic personae in art markets too. More strategic players of the Instagram image-game for example increasingly pitch their work with barely disguised career aims in mind. This means that the supposed casualness of the Instagram platform can be deployed in ways that knowingly draw on the intuited naturalism of the medium, yet in lieu of professional outcomes (16). From the outside it might appear that such-and-such an artist is only too happy to show off their latest artwork fully installed at whatever gallery it is currently showing at purely for the sake of letting people know what they are up to ‘right now’. But images of this kind, even at their most apparently spontaneous, are never that dumb on social media. Moreover when images of your own work are strategically juxtaposed both with images of yourself, and artworks from a prestigious existing canon whose works bear a superficial similarity, an implicit connection is established. Such a connection, which may in fact be fairly arbitrary, starts to suggest an artist’s ‘rightful’ place in the contemporary pantheon as much as in art history (17). The only paradox is that the type of historicity upon which such self-promotion depends in the apparently outside-less domain of social media only exists in the present (18). The pervasive sense that history has already happened additionally suggests that the future will always just be a version of now (19). Of course there are degrees of the blatantly professionalised use of social media. At its basest, artistic self-promotion comes across loud and clear in all its furtive anxiety and arrogance. It may even reach the limits of utmost literality, of an artist baldly advertising for instance that they are ‘looking for representation by a New York dealer’. Less crass and more effective approaches insert art simultaneously within a life context and professional milieu. Nevertheless it remains that even an apparently innocent approach like this, where everything is transparently on show, forces the very idea of art and life, to be productive and entrepreneurial. Process images appear only because they lead us to a successful finished product exhibited in a gallery or museum. Collectively these pre- images function like the trailer for a completed feature film or, more ambitiously, a ‘blockbuster’. Either way they are a further means of generating audience and market expectation (20).
The artist cannily deploying social media as a self-marketing tool knows that ‘word gets around’. The currency of social media images increases exponentially because today such imagery travels globally. The visual language of success is well rehearsed and despite global cultural differences it remains almost universally readable. Naturally, full knowledge of local cultural signifiers and hierarchies is more difficult to access. But in a world trading images like money it is the image that precedes, even negates, understanding. What is important is affect. Affect can translate into real offers to exhibit in real galleries that would otherwise have been unknown and/or inaccessible. Furthermore, the virtual space of social media like Instagram has begun to operate like a gallery. The type of gallery social media is has very many wings and annexes. These are museological or commercial. In the latter instance, with an interface like Instagram acting as a dealerless dealer gallery, the artist may succeed in selling their work direct-to-the- public thereby undercutting the gate-keeping function of the professional art dealer. While such an approach may translate into concrete financial success, it does so mainly in the absence of the symbolic and institutional value associated with established commercial galleries. Making money as an artist direct from social media applications, while it must be increasingly tempting and possible, is likely to be disregarded by bona- fide art world professionals as merely amateurish. The free-market space of contemporary capitalist democracy is still imbued with symbolic hierarchies responsible for initiating the cultural producer via the simultaneous conjoining of cultural and actual capital. Still big name commercial dealers all use social media sites like Instagram. Their use of it differs little from individual artists captitalising directly on its financial and promotional capabilities. A collector on Instagram trawling the virtualised stockrooms of dealer-spaces can immediately claim work for their collections without having to physically visit the gallery. While the dealer space adds interest to an artwork’s value based on their professional expertise, the solo artist selling online collects the artwork’s full value (21). Social media platforms like Instagram can also intentionally or unintentionally, highlight the transparency of dealer/collector transactions: you like the look of an Instagrammed work held in the stockroom of a féted commercial gallery? Just post a comment. The fact that every other visitor to this site can see your naked desire for an artist’s work could be very beneficial for the dealer. When someone’s work is clearly wanted more people are likely to want it too. And if there’s anything social media is about, it’s about being wanted.
The fact that social media has become such a key means for artistic self-promotion may be of little concern: Instagram as a new way to promote yourself as an artist? So what. Artists have been entrepreneurial self-promoters for many decades. Besides, surely the instant global scope afforded by social media makes reaching new audiences a breeze. Isn’t this a good thing? Doesn’t your work deserve greater exposure? These functionally enabling aspects of social media come at a price though. That price is the perpetual, generally unconscious, commodification of the self. It may seem that social media in its infinite unfolding is organically occurring. Its ‘browserly’ nature however is actually directive. Social media needs you to interact with it. It is always waiting. It is eternally imploring you for your 'content'. Without your content, in the form of posts, re-posts, comments and likes, the anonymity and automation on which social media is structurally founded would be too obscenely perceivable to be seductive (22). Viewing your life or art practice as ‘user-content’ essentially transforms living processes into dead images. This paradox manifests as the curious feeling of freedom you experience while simultaneously objectifying yourself. On social media ‘you’ are always the content on offer, to yourself as much as to others.
Seeing every social media moment as a potential productive opportunity is to enslave yourself to a vision of life where everything you do privately and as an artist is for a reason, a reason you only appear to control. Perhaps it simply offers you a chance to emerge in order to say, ‘I am here. I am alive’. Nonetheless, when your professional and private selves have seamlessly merged as one productive online package, there is nothing left to imagine. There is nothing greater to reveal in the images you post beyond what they already instantly show. In the end, artists wholeheartedly dedicated to social media find themselves, happily perhaps but still irrevocably, in a situation where they are ever-presently nowhere. Lives and works glide by at a rapid pace in a flick-by world social by name only (23). Here nothing really sticks. Individual presence is momentary soon to be forgotten. For some there is no issue with this: ‘it is what it is’. But what it is to maintain a consistently acknowledged presence in the insta-world of social media, is the perpetual labour of overproduction and overexposure (24). You want to be someone, or at least to appear to be? Then you need to be that someone all the time (25). Your non-stop presence is required, it is demanded. The work this entails is addictive because it is both forever illusory and endlessly promising. Who knows, maybe the next person you ‘friend’ will lead you to new unimagined opportunities? Or perhaps the friend after will? Even if we know social media is an elaborately contrived enclosed prism we choose to believe it isn't because it's fun. It’s addictive. It’s as wildly diverse as the lifestyles and attitudes of its innumerable users. It frequently leads to unexpected places. Yet rather than the carefree horizontally democratic space it pretends to be, social media keeps our attention for a reason. It wants to keep us engaged at all times. It wants to keep us focused on our own likes and our own lives and our ongoing desire for their online augmentation. What would happen though if our online identities went offline? This would not mean turning off the Internet to assume the regressive stance of technophobic philistines. It would mean transferring the anarchic freedoms offered us virtually online to the offline world (26). The function of social media would no longer then be the compensatory transformation of the self into a commodifiable avatar but the actualising of online processes in the 3D world.
Alex Gawronski
Originally published, Broadsheet vol 46 no. 1, Jan, Feb, Mar 2017. CACSA, Adelaide, Australia.
1. Frank Zappa, ‘I Come From Nowhere’, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin, Los Angeles, 1982.
2. Social media, especially Google and Facebook, covertly use ‘personalised’ tracking algorithms to direct your interests and searches in related directions. This information is also stored by these companies and sold to third party affiliates. See José Van Dijk, The Culture of Connectivity: a Critical History of Social Media’, Oxford University Press. New York, 2013. Additionally ‘One should not forget that the Internet is owned privately’. Boris Groys ‘Art on the Internet’, In the Flow, Verso. London, New York, 2016, p.179.
3. ‘...social media have transformed the notion of a “work” from a series of isolated projects to a constant broadcast of one’s artistic identity as a recognisable, unique brand’. Brad Troemel, ‘Athletic Aesthetics’, No Internet, No Art, Lunch Bytes, Onomatopee 102. Amsterdam, 2015, p. 120.
4. Peintre maudit or ‘accursed painters’ was a term that appeared in France in the late 19th Century. It was used derogatorily to refer to post-impressionist and early modernist painters.
5. Boris Groys ‘Art on the Internet’, In the Flow, Verso. London, New York, 2016, p-179.
6. Hito Steyerl, ‘Too Much World: is the Internet Dead?’ The Internet Does Not Exist, Sternberg Press. Berlin, 2015, p 20.
7. ‘...reality now widely consists of images; or rather, of things, constellations, and processes formerly evident as images’. Ibid. p. 18.
8. The self-portrait as far as it speaks of a very particular person, the artist, is unique. Its capacity to touch viewers is, at least from a humanist perspective, theoretically universal.
9. ‘It is strange to think how, in spite of so many young artists now playing with digital aesthetics, it was actually Warhol who saw it coming most clearly. The massive shift from depth to surface that Warhol explained with celebrity culture and advertising has now taken hold of language itself and spread across the planet’. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle in ‘The Internet Does Not Exist’, Sternberg Press. Berlin, 2015, p 9.
10. ‘...the divide between artist and viewer becomes negligible when users of social media are able to more powerfully define the context (and thus meaning) of an artwork’. Brad Troemel, ‘Art After Social Media’, You Are Here, Art After the Internet. Cornerhouse/ SPACE, Oxford, London, p. 39.
11. For example, ‘... even less successful posts will serve to strengthen the bond between artist and audience, giving each other a chance to reinforce the existence of the other – ‘I’m still here!” they say in unison’. Brad Troemel, ‘Athletic Aesthetics’, No Internet, No Art, Lunch Bytes, Onomatopee 102. Amsterdam, 2015, p. 124.
12. Reviewing the ‘post-Internet’ group exhibition ‘Tabularium’ held at Slopes gallery Melbourne in 2013, co-authors Hamishi Farah and Aurelia Cuo write ‘I feel like I am walking around inside an install shot. The works are beautiful; they are also cool, light, tech, premium, and optimized for the screen’. Hamishi Farah and Aurelia Cuo, ‘Tabularium: An Exhibition with the Foresight to Plan its own Funeral’, Rhizome, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/sep/08/tabularium-slopes/, 08/09/2014.
13. With this in mind it is telling that contemporary smart phone technology is increasingly veering towards the use of 3D imaging software.
14. ‘Zombie Formalism is a recent breed of mostly male, mostly generic abstraction mostly expressed in paint on canvas’. See Kenny Schachter, ‘Dawn of the Dead’, Monopol Magazin for Kunst und Leben, http://www.monopol-magazin.de/dawn-dead, 19/01/2016.
15. Such art ‘requires nothing of you but 5 seconds to look (and trade for successively higher profits) before it spontaneously combusts like a proposed mission from Mission Impossible’. Ibid.
16. In the era of social media ‘an unprecedented number of artists use marketing and business strategies like mini-corporate brands to develop their online-specific personas and their output (both personal and artistic) for maximum attention and successful careers’. Brad Troemel, ‘Art After Social Media’, You Are Here, Art After the Internet. Cornerhouse/SPACE, Oxford, p. 37.
17. Even nearly all ‘...undergraduate art school students have blogs to insert themselves into a historical discourse with online displays of their artwork next to that of significant artworks of the past’, ibid, p. 39.
18. This is like the historicity of Hollywood films and money. History in the former is simply the play of representational affect. Money needs no historical legitimisation as it is only ever equal to itself, value = value. In social media, history is dissimulation. What you posted ten years ago, if it is even traceable, will almost certainly be worthless.
19. If social media mean that history is simply the play of meme-like appearances then it’s likely to stay that way. The future, as much as the past, will be just as much a question of the circulation of affect in the present.
20. Alternatively, in the image-world of social media, sheer productivity itself can be enough as ‘the artist does need to produce any final product, any artwork; the documentation of the process of art making is already an artwork’. Boris Groys ‘Art on the Internet’, In the Flow, Verso. London, New York, 2016, p.180.
21. This is almost inevitably significantly less than that of work sold through in professional dealer galleries.
22. Impersonally revealed then would be the ‘... unmanned computers responsible for moving fractional sums according to complicated if-then sequences programmed by quantative analysts’. Brad Troemel, ‘Athletic Aesthetics’, No Internet, No Art, Lunch Bytes, Onomatopee 102. Amsterdam, 2015, p. 124.
23. See Geert Lovinck. ‘ What is the Social in Social Media’ The Internet Does Not Exist, Sternberg Press. Berlin, 2015.
24. ‘What separates the aesthlete from the overworked intern or sweatshop worker is that the aesthletes’ labor serves themselves; it’s self-exploitation rather than exploitation at the hands of other capitalists’. Brad Troemel, ‘Athletic Aesthetics’, No Internet, No Art, Lunch Bytes, Onomatopee 102. Amsterdam, 2015, p. 126.
25. And this is the case even if that someone is a ‘character’. ‘Critically’ fictionalised social media accounts like the already copiously cited and analysed Instagram account of ‘Amalia Ulman’ for example speaks of this imperative for constant exposure. Ulman’s online timeline proceeds through very many permutations. These often engage online gendered clichés. One minute Ulman is a demure blonde posting innumerable seductive bedtime selfies. The next minute she is a serious, short-haired brunette office worker. Later she’s a clown or coy ingénue dressed as Pierrot, then a meme-spewing online activist. Later she’s in ads for Gucci. Elsewhere she’s learning to fire a gun or the apparent victim of domestic abuse. At first these self- representations are utterly believable. The more you scroll through them though the collectively weirder and less synchronous the images become. And the more contrived. Nevertheless in order for Ulman’s many characters to remain viable on social media, they need to be perpetually updated. They need to be kept alive. Another semi-fictionalised account, related its commitment to an ongoing online presence (though otherwise distinct from Ulman’s output) is the Instagram account of Sydney artist Giselle Stanborough. Stanborough repeatedly uses the anthropomorphised image of her pricked finger (she is diabetic). As a ‘partial-object’ in psychoanalytical terms, Stanborough’s blooded fingertip both does and doesn’t stand for the artist, just as her social media account simultaneously does and doesn’t. The finger, the artist’s online ‘thing’, only continues to live as long she constantly manufactures new identities for it.
26. For example, ‘if copyright can be dodged and called into question, why can’t private property?’ Hito Steyerl, ‘Too Much World: is the Internet Dead?’ The Internet Does Not Exist, Sternberg Press. Berlin, 2015, p.22.