Volume 40, Numbers 1&2
Spring/Summer 2012
Edited by Patricia Clough & Jasbir Puar
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SARAH:
Viral Veils
Choosing information for the word cloud projected as a “Viral Veil” over my portrait proved quite the challenging prospect. When given the opportunity to compose a self portrait often the self can get in the way of a comprehensive representation. However, collaborating with Johanna, Veronica and Jasmine really helped flush out ideas about how one chooses to project oneself and how society absorbs that reflection and creates a panoptic view of self representation.
Delving deeper into creating a “Viral Veil” for myself, I first used services such as Wordle and Tagxedo to aggregate words from my social media profiles and RSS feeds. As you start to examine what is trending in your personal social media dialogues it is important to note the content is a mix bag of insights both flattering and unbecoming to your personal profile. In the true fashion of Narcissus. it’s like looking in a mirror of how you represent yourself using the meta data world and that data does not lie because it is based off the content you choose to post.
Like any self-reflection and examination there are things we love and accept about ourselves and there are things we would rather forget and bury deep within. The brilliance of this project is its ability to highlight social media as a means to re-imagine ourselves in the world as well as a means to understand the concrete truth to who we are whether we like that projection or not.
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VERONICA:
So often as women we’re defined by such superficialities — how we look, how we dress. It was so refreshing to be able to strip away the physicalities and define myself on my own terms, by my interests and passions. This experiment and — in a larger sense — social media itself creates this new wonderful lens through which we can project ourselves onto the world. I can love French cooking and Jane Austen novels and still be down with 90s Hip Hop and Andre Ethier. In what other realm of life is that possible?
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If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the shoe?
The truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off.
-Gloria Steinem
