The Selfie Wall will be performed April 27, 28, & 29 at the StARTup Art Fair San Francisco.
The Selfie Wall is both literally a selfie wall and a performance piece that occurs in social media. It is a way to reclaim the identities that have been stripped by the autocorrect application: a ubiquitous program that exhibits a bias against nontraditional/non-Anglo Saxon names.
To create the piece I collect names that are autocorrected to words. I then embroider the words onto a gorgeous dark blue velvet tapestry that is installed on a stand alone curtain rod. This acts as the selfie wall in front of which people will take their selfies before sharing their images to social media.
Thru my earlier work using the autocorrect program I noticed the strange word choice and bias of autocorrect. It is a very subtle issue, but it is indicative of a larger cultural bias that occurs within the tech industry. It feels very significant that this ubiquitous program changes specific types of names, regularly, into words. It almost becomes an identity erasure.
I’m also very interested in the curated selfie experience. This seems like a sort of digital performance art- where the act of taking and sharing a selfie becomes the main purpose of an otherwise visual art experience. This makes a selfie wall full of autocorrected names/words a means to reclaim identity, in a fun way and light hearted way.
The Selfie Wall performance encompasses all the steps of the selfie wall creation process: the collecting of autocorrected names, embroidering the names/words onto the Selfie Wall tapestry, then the taking and sharing of the selfies. Sometimes all three steps will occur at the same moment when I perform live- I will actively embroider names onto the selfie wall as people “donate” their autocorrected names to me, all while selfie taking/sharing occurs.
THE SELFIE WALL
The Selfie Wall will be performed April 27, 28, & 29 at the StARTup Art Fair San Francisco.
The Selfie Wall is both literally a selfie wall and a performance piece that occurs in social media. It is a way to reclaim the identities that have been stripped by the autocorrect application: a ubiquitous program that exhibits a bias against nontraditional/non-Anglo Saxon names.
To create the piece I collect names that are autocorrected to words. I then embroider the words onto a gorgeous dark blue velvet tapestry that is installed on a stand alone curtain rod. This acts as the selfie wall in front of which people will take their selfies before sharing their images to social media.
Thru my earlier work using the autocorrect program I noticed the strange word choice and bias of autocorrect. It is a very subtle issue, but it is indicative of a larger cultural bias that occurs within the tech industry. It feels very significant that this ubiquitous program changes specific types of names, regularly, into words. It almost becomes an identity erasure.
I’m also very interested in the curated selfie experience. This seems like a sort of digital performance art- where the act of taking and sharing a selfie becomes the main purpose of an otherwise visual art experience. This makes a selfie wall full of autocorrected names/words a means to reclaim identity, in a fun way and light hearted way.
The Selfie Wall performance encompasses all the steps of the selfie wall creation process: the collecting of autocorrected names, embroidering the names/words onto the Selfie Wall tapestry, then the taking and sharing of the selfies. Sometimes all three steps will occur at the same moment when I perform live- I will actively embroider names onto the selfie wall as people “donate” their autocorrected names to me, all while selfie taking/sharing occurs.