Mirrr - Projects on the construction of identity and Flickr

by Sascha Pohflepp and Jakob Schillinger

This is a series of three projects investigating what constitutes the self. It questions the relationship between self-perception (a passive concept of the self) and active construction of identity. It tries to identify the methods, motivations and paradigms underlying both concepts, yet clearly focusing on the latter.

Initially our research focused on the practice of designing how one is percieved by others , i.e. designing one's image. This practice also referred to as "lifestyle" basically means creating narratives out of experiences and events, carefully selecting and editing, reordering the meaning of events in retrospect.

Of an enormous amount of tools to design and media to distribute one's image (public self) one tool which owes its existence exclusivley to the desire of showing off one's good life is flickr. www.flickr.com is an online photosharing platform which allows users to upload up to 2 GB of images per month to their account, make them public and have them commented by the people they are connected with through Flickr's social networking features. On their website flickr calls visitors to "show off your favourite images to the world". While all three projects refer to flickr as a manifestation of the above described, the second project fixr can be read without knowledge of flickr.

Egoshootr

As an introduction: "My Sunset", a short film about the way we felt that flickr is being used by many people.

Addressing the desire of "showing off" one's good life "to the world", the installation gives people the opportunity to construct scenarios in a playful way and publishes the images to Flickr. A big, round table forms the stage to arrange miniature items (1:25) made of photo-prints mounted roughly on white cardboard. A variety of backdrops, mock-ups of people and significant objects and locations (such as airplanes, the manhattan skyline, the usual after-party-beer-bottle-and-ashtray etc.) provide the elements to design "your favourite photos". These are taken with the visitors own digital cameras mounted to a tripod in the center of the installation, thereby mixing them with the "real" photographs already exising on the camera's memory or to be taken afterwards.

The setup's explicit exaggeration offers the security of non-commitment: it is so obviously fake, the very act of selecting, arranging, and capturing so game-like, that it encourages exaggeration and giving in to rather unconscious self-conceptions and wishes. In other words: Playing with the installation is primarily fun the issues posed by the implicit logic of lifestyle-practice are adressed in a very subtle way. Rather than judging it, it trys to trigger awareness and pose questions:

Is this practice to be denounced as (self-)deception, or rather to be embraced as a romantic realization of wishes and expectations in retrospect, the reclaiming of power which one did not have over the actual event (by turning it into one's own narrative)?
Are these narratives exclusively aimed at others, or are they (or at least do they become afterwards) an integral part of the contruction of one's identity?
To what extend does anticipating and evaluating an event's potential to provide material for a satisfying narrative change the process of the event itself?

Sketch of the Egoshootr table-like stage

A typical party-shot like thousands on Flickr

The whole scene was built from cardboard

Fixr

Fixr deals with the role of photography and the importance of surface, of visual appearance.

The relation between an object or event and its photograph is indexical. When reading a photograph, however, we tend to ignore its confinedness the frame frame is a cut-out of both space and time. When reading the photograph we expand this frame to the much larger entity of a situation. Thus photographic representations become powerful symbols which form the vocabulary to "write the self".

Fixr claims to be a free service that "helps you to close the gaps in the digital record of your life". In the form of an online form it asks users to "submit a detailed description of the moment" they "missed", i.e. did not take a picture of. Initially meant as a statement which would hopefully triggers thoughts about and awareness of the use of photography, fixr recieved overwhelming feedback. Of more than 100 requests submitted daily, many were beautiful, funny, poetic, thoughtful or revealing. Almost all of them indicated strong commitment.

A selection of the submitted requests is printed on photographic paper. In the exhibition some of the requests were replaced by photographs of reenactments to emphasize the photographic reading of the textualized moments.

http://www.fixr.org

The texts are actual submissions as shown in printed form during the exhibition

"I saw a woman in a camouflage coat and tartan skirt yelling obscenities at no one in particular. Then another man ran by screaming to himself."

Mirrr

Flickr as well as other new technologies (not to say "communication technologies") point out their communicative aspect ("connecting people" etc.). Since narration is an act of communication, it seems a safe assumption that the main motivation for the described practice (of turning one's life into a narrative) is to design how one is percieved by others. Mirrr however questions this model resp. the role of audience, referring to flickr as an example once more.

A flickr-user deals with the rather abstract audience of the world wide web, which could either be millions or noone at all. Nobody would really let millions read their diaries and it is doubtful if there is any "reader" at all. But at least there could be. It is exactly this very vague potential of an audience that makes flickr so successful. The idea of an audience is vague and remote enough not to be threatening but only so vague as to still provide reason for the described practice itself. It justifies the effort itself as well as applying "cosmetic corrections", it makes it possible to reorder the meaning of events in retrospect without lying to oneself. As one user puts it: "...So the site gives me a reason to do things that I enjoy doing, a reason to record things, a reason to take photos because I will publish them"

Mirrr is inspired by a project by Lisa Rave using t-shirts as a medium to address oneself instead of others: At occasions such as ars-electronica where most of the audience will probably be flickr users, Mirrr offers you "your personal flickr t-shirt". After giving his/her flickr-screenname to one of the Mirrr-staff the visitor is told to come back 15 minutes later. On return s/he is guided to a changing room where he finds his flickr t-shirt with the tags s/he used to organize and describe the uploaded photographs printed all over.

Mirrr confronts the visitor with his/her self-conception by projecting it's essence onto his/her reflection in the mirror. This takes place in the intimate setup of a changing room, which itself connotates self-reflection and designing one's appearance. The twist in this setup is that the words on the shirt are flipped horizontally so they can easily be read in the mirror. Implying that the visitor's narrative is actually addressing himself while claiming to address others, it does not only confront the visitor with the narrative itself, but also with the underlying paradigms: A narcissistic interest in the world as a projection-screen for one's own reflection. The world wide web can be understood as a manifestation of the gaze, the "world" becomes a mirror.

Exhibition

Thank you very much, everybody who helped us with these projects - especially Annika, Christoph, Marty, Noortje, Régine, Roy, Tim, and Linda the flickrette.

Sascha Pohflepp and Jakob Schillinger (cc)2005

www.pohflepp.com
www.golam.org