In Kate Raynes-Goldies' 2010 essay: Aliases, Creeping, and Wall Cleaning: Understanding Privacy in the Age of Facebook she discusses at length the kind of complications that can arise out of the encouraging of certain types of behaviours while simultaneously discouraging others. She states that on Facebook, "users are suppose to be their "true" selves, interact with "real" friends and respect the privacy of others…" while simultaneously are suppose to submit and agree to the stipulations of the Facebook Inc. goal, which to have full and unrestrained access to personal information over the Internet.(1) However, some users developed forms of "subversive behaviours [that] demonstrate[d] that participants were quite aware that Facebook Inc's highly touted privacy controls are easily circumvented…" and artist Ed Fornieles is exactly that kind of user.
Ed Fornieles is a London based, UK artist who uses Facebook as a source for developing elaborate plot lines and character developments using real-life information from the websites other users. In one of his more elaborate undertakings, Dorm Daze (2011) was a Facebook specific sitcom. The sitcom involved 35 different characters made from collected (or "scalped"(2) as he calls it) information that was off of Americana users in California. Each of these "characters" were then allocated to various friends of the artist, each friend/user was then instructed to "inhabit" these character profiles and transform into them via online exchanges between each other and the artist. The result was an "incredible dialogue… always, between our experience of fiction and our experience of reality."(3) Later this dialogue was culminated with a video work, as well as an installation at Carlos/Ishikawa gallery in London, 2011. Like Raynes-Goldies example of the subversive user, Fornieles' Facebook Sitcom undermines the assumptions of authenticity on the internet and exploits a non-traditional platform for story telling and narrative building in a chaotic collapse of both physical and digital realities.
What at first seems like a bizarre version of Gossip Girls quickly turns into a complex and accurate representation of Facebook user ship. A user ship that, when looked at through this particular gaze, seems insular, self-absorbed and ludicrous in a kind of unsettling and home-hitting way. Maybe this needs a bit more unfolding, what I mean to suggest is that it could be possible that the people that Fornieles appropriated his information from do not actually speak, act or use Facebook in the same way that he represents them. However, if one is to look at Facebook user ship and nothing else then one will notice the needy, seedy and narcissistic qualities of user behaviour. This is especially true in regards to frequent and committed user ship, which is exactly the kind of users that Facebook and most Internet giants would like to see overwhelm and homogenize our last and possibly most sacred playground.
Notes:
1) Kate Raynes- Goldies', Aliases, Creeping, and Wall Cleaning: Understanding Privacy in the Age of Facebook, 2010
2) Ed Fornieles, Ways Beyond the Internet at the 2012 DLD Conference, www.dld-conference.com, 2012
3) Ed Fornieles, in conversation with Joanne McNeil: Artist Profile, Rhizome.org, Spring 2012
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