V&A Digital Futures – Self Versioning: Exploring the Potentials of the Digital Self
Tues 31 Mar 2015, 4-8:30pm
As our digital and IRL identities continue to blur and compress, the upcoming V&A Digital Futures session, Self Versioning, showcases work by artists who explore and test the boundaries of self representation in our age of networked culture.
In the immersive online environment of selfies, hashtags, Instagram edits Facebook and Twitter streams – a personal photo is no longer reserved for the family album, but takes on the role of social signifier – creating an index of a person’s self-value.
This mediated digital self operates as an individual unit in digital culture and is driven by an addictive impulse to communicate a version(s) of identity to a virtual audience as a disembodied sender. The sublimation of the human body into a digital avatar highlights this transition away from the body as a site of authenticity and towards an aesthetics of representation.
Self Versioning is part of the V&A Digital Futures programme co-curated with Rachel Falconer, Head of Art and Technology at SPACE and hosted at The White Building.
The session consists of an artist showcase followed by a panel discussion which will probe the gap between the perception of our own identity and its distributed representation via social media platforms. This marks a shift away from the fusion of subject /object (as in the screen / mirror construct of the broadcast era) and towards a dismembering of subject /object in which the participation of others is constitutive to the construct of the digital self.
Digital Futures is a regular open event and platform for displaying and discussing of work by researchers, artists,designers, companies and other professionals working with art, technology, design, science and beyond. It is also networking event, bringing together people from different backgrounds and disciplines with a view to generating and future collaborations.
Schedule:
4-6pm showcase
6.30-8.30pm panel discussion
Participants to be announced.
