Friend me

As a society we have embraced the internet and its’ data sharing opportunities. Behind our uploads and mouse clicks, algorithmic processes take place to data mine and track our activity. ‘Friend me’ was born out of an investigation into these processes. Each image, representing a facebook friend, is a visual montaged record of my browsing activity through friends’ photo uploads on facebook. The montages are determined not only by my friends’ image uploads and the order of their uploads, but also by my personal browsing activity and the patterns of selectivity that arose in following one important rule – the resulting montages must not clearly reveal any individual’s identity. Adhering to this rule by following a strict set of parameters, a paradox of observation begins to emerge in that the production of observations also produces concealments.

“In order for something to be made observable at all, other things – certain fields that are ambiguously linked to observation and organize it in a certain way – drop out of the same observation. In brief, the paradox emerges that by means of producing something (an observation), we unwillingly also produce it’s opposite (concealing).” (Katti, 1975)

‘Friend me’, lambda prints, 2012.