The Selfie Wall
2018
Embroidery on velvet, performance and installation
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.
The Selfie Wall was performed April 27–29 at the StARTup Art Fair San Francisco. It is both literally a selfie wall and a performance piece that occurs in social media — 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, then embroider those words onto a dark blue velvet tapestry installed on a stand-alone curtain rod. That becomes the wall in front of which people take their selfies before sharing them to social media.
Through my earlier work with autocorrect I noticed the strange word choice and bias of the program. It is a subtle issue, but indicative of a larger cultural bias within the tech industry — this ubiquitous program regularly changes specific types of names into words, almost an identity erasure.
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