This exhibition was put together by Christiane Paul, Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum. For the past ten years, she has been intrigued by the increasing disappearance of the boundary between the public and private spheres.
Whether through social media or the proliferation of surveillance systems, privacy is becoming a thing of the past. There’s something both amusing and disturbing about the exhibition that explores the notion without redundancy. Within the media-based world, photography is one of the preferred methods of sharing knowledge, and several works on display use and redefine it.
This is the case for Carlo Zanni, who discovered pictures of himself while browsing Google Maps. He made screen capture of the image then titled it, “Self Portrait with Dog.” The coincidence occurred again when he found an image of his silhouette walking through the streets of Milan with friends. He called that one, “Self-portrait with friends.” Here photography is defined as impromptu and uncontrolled. The tool itself is different and its aesthetic criteria rushed.
The work of Eva and Franco Mattes, The Others, is also based on the use of existing and trivial photographs. Their project consists in a compilation of more than 10,000 images recovered from the personal computers of internet users all around the world. They then projected the photos publicly in a video or posted them on their website, thus explicitly crossing the border between the private and public.
This is precisely part of Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s process. They acquired thousands of Facebook profile photos, which they had analyzed by a software program that determines personality types. Cirio and Ludovico took the results and created a dating site using these digital identities. The work questions the process of grabbing private images, which is somehow the origin of social networks since it is more or less what was done by Mark Zuckerberg looting photos of the university year book in order to start his website.
The phenomenon is regularly questioned for ethical reasons and just as regularly ignored by the millions of users of the site who do not feel personally affected by this reality. It’s amusing to see the reactions of the internet users who learned that they were included in this project. Their letters range from seething to ironic to cynical. The installation also questions the role played by photography in the image we present of ourselves, an extension of the self-portrait using contemporary tools.
The exhibition is a reflection on a potentially frightening future where representation is omnipresent, ranging from poetry, as is the case of Wafaa Bilal, to playfulness, as in Jill Magid‘s piece. All the exhibited works are based in our daily reality, making any denial almost impossible.
Laurence Cornet
The Public Private
Until April 17th, 2013
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
Parsons The New School for Design
2 West 13th Street
New York
USA
