Title: Naked Eye
“The social organizes the self as a techno-cultural entity, a special effect of software, which is rendered addictive by real-time feedback features.” Geert Lovi.
Any social media user today is familiar with the experience of parasocial relationships – those that are one-sided, where one person extends emotional energy interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other's existence. We each follow hundreds or thousands of Internet personalities who feed our thoughts and inform the ways we behave and perform. But without physical contact, who are these people to us, really?
Parasocial becomes paranormal as the digital ghosts of the artists, critics, and thinkers we admire haunt our social feeds and possess the communities we seek out in real life. We listen to their podcasts weekly, engage with their memes daily, and read their articles the moment they reach our inbox. Under a microscope, one can see that these people are merely just pixels on a screen, RGB lightwave avatars like anyone else. Looking through the barrel, we see social media for what they really are; renderings of communities that are only blank facades if there is no offline presence. Without a space to meet and exist IRL, what is social media if not a dying specimen confined to a petri dish?
I photographed some of my favorite Internet personalities with a 4/.010 objective lens, magnifying the pixels of their Instagram photos by 40x. Some of these figures I’ve met in passing, others have employed me, others I still need to get coffee with, some I might never meet. All of them I know at least 40x more than they know me.
Title: Naked Eye
“The social organizes the self as a techno-cultural entity, a special effect of software, which is rendered addictive by real-time feedback features.” Geert Lovi.
Any social media user today is familiar with the experience of parasocial relationships – those that are one-sided, where one person extends emotional energy interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other's existence. We each follow hundreds or thousands of Internet personalities who feed our thoughts and inform the ways we behave and perform. But without physical contact, who are these people to us, really?
Parasocial becomes paranormal as the digital ghosts of the artists, critics, and thinkers we admire haunt our social feeds and possess the communities we seek out in real life. We listen to their podcasts weekly, engage with their memes daily, and read their articles the moment they reach our inbox. Under a microscope, one can see that these people are merely just pixels on a screen, RGB lightwave avatars like anyone else. Looking through the barrel, we see social media for what they really are; renderings of communities that are only blank facades if there is no offline presence. Without a space to meet and exist IRL, what is social media if not a dying specimen confined to a petri dish?
I photographed some of my favorite Internet personalities with a 4/.010 objective lens, magnifying the pixels of their Instagram photos by 40x. Some of these figures I’ve met in passing, others have employed me, others I still need to get coffee with, some I might never meet. All of them I know at least 40x more than they know me.