MASK (Metamorphosis Aesthetics SocialMedia Kaleidoscope)
An essay in four sections: the first on re-reading Book 3 of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ centering on an empathetic understanding of Narcissus; followed by a review of Roseland Krauss’s ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’ that links to image entrapment to; the third section on social media usage and addiction; which is finally countered by the emancipatory potential of the alienated self.
by Elliott Burns and Pita Arreola-Burns
(aka Off Site Project)
𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺
M is for Metamorphosis
A is for Aesthetics
S is for Social Media
K is for Kaleidoscope
To coincide with the launch of I am surrounded by me by Off Site Project for Distant.Gallery, we have authored an essay in four parts. MASK subsects and explores the thematic concerns and cornerstone influences that inspired the exhibition. Whilst trying to reclaim Narcissus from narcissism and make a case for AR filters as the evolutionary heirs to early video art practices.
𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺
M is for METAMORPHOSIS
Did Narcissus drown? I seem to remember thinking so when I was younger, though the precise time that this misnomer was corrected I cannot readily recall. It’s possible that I’ve believed that false-tale until quite recently. More certainly I was incorrect in my belief that Narcissus was in love with himself, though there is a little more ambiguity around this misconception.
To set records straight for myself — and maybe for the reader, depending on how well versed you are — Narcissus did not drown. He did not tip over and plunge into the water whilst trying to kiss his own reflection. The mirrored surface of the tranquil pool did not give way to depths and weeds that tangled his feet and bound him below a saving breath. His death was a slower defeat, he is wasted and melts over an unclear duration. His reflection is a trap he cannot free himself from and consuming nothing but unrequited love he expires.
A normal person will survive three days without water. Born of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope we might presume it took Narcissus a few days more to wilt away.
As for the second error needing correction, this one is far more culturally ingrained owing to some one hundred and twenty-four years of discussion of narcissism. English sexologist Havelock Ellis first evoked the Greek myth in psychological texts in 1898 using the term ‘narcissus-like’ and a year later Paul Näcke translated the paper into German, substituting the ‘-like’ for an ‘ism’. The earliest monograph on narcissism dates to 1911 and the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank, though it is Freud’s On narcissism published in 1914 that adds a sophisticated analysis of the underlying conditions of self-love.
Rejecting the sexualised interpretations of Ellis, Näcke and Rank, Freud defines narcissism as the withdrawal of the libido from the external and its direction towards the ego. Freud identified Narcissus’s rejection of admiration as a contextual framework for his fate. And additionally recognised the importance of the nymph Echo, coining the term ‘anaclitic attachment’ as a subtype of narcissism, one who feeds the overvalued other.
Whilst presenting a more nuanced idea of the condition of narcissism, Freud’s interpretation doubles-down on a misreading of Ovid’s text, again adding credence to the idea that Narcissus was consciously in love with himself. To understand why this is a subtle mistreatment of the figure we must return to the source material.
Using the translation offered by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University as our base, we need to pay close attention to the subject terms written by Ovid as the narrator and as Ovid writing on the behalf of Narcissus. Within this choice of language a certain pattern of disassociation is detectable which refutes to some extent the absolutist view that Narcissus was in love with himself. Instead what can be noted is a shifting state where between given moments Narcissus either loves a figure he conceives as being separate from himself, loves a figure he understands as himself, or is caught between these two conditions and is unable to stabilise a single mindset.
Introducing the circumstance, Ovid explains that weary from hunting Narcissus seeks to quench his thirst and as he drinks sees a reflection of his face. This is the first time Narcissus has ever seen himself. Written from the third person, Ovid is equipped with the knowledge that the protagonist may not be aware of. Every instance of “his face,” “his eyes,” “his hair” or “himself” reads as a confirmation that Narcissus understands but may instead mislead us. Instead reflecting the author’s omniscience. More tellingly, Ovid explains that:
“What he is looking at he does not recognize, but what he sees sets him aflame, and the very error which deceives his eyes excites them.”
From the outset we are given a sense that Narcissus cannot tell that he is the reflected subject. The surface of the still pool is an “error” capable of deceiving him. The reflection begins as a separated figure, a position forwarded by the language Narcissus employs. When he first addresses the figure he says: “I see him, and he pleases me.” ‘I’ and ‘him’, ‘he’ and ‘me’ confirming that he believes himself and the reflection to be two separate persons. This position is further established with his uses of “extraordinary boy,” “loving face of yours,” and studying their identical actions “you weeping when I shed tears”.
Yet as if a veil is lifted, there are moments to his monologue that peel back the illusion. He begins to understand that “I am in you” and goes on lamenting that “My riches have made me poor” wishing that he could “divide myself from my own body.” Here he moves beyond the childhood stages of self-recognition and begins to deal with the perverse circumstance he finds himself bound to. As he cries he breaks the surface of the water, disturbing the image and scattering his reflection. Anguish pulls him back to the delusion and he commands “Stay! Do not leave me, you pitiless boy”.
The tragedy of Narcissus is not the sin of self-absorption. He would not be diagnosed as a narcissist by our modern definitions. Rather, his tragedy is to be beguiled by the alienated face, the othered self-image, the reflection that is partially recognisable and yet constantly out manoeuvring us.
With a little forced perspective Narcissus can become emblematic of contemporaneous relations with augmented-reality face filters.
𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺
A is for AESTHETICS
Paired with the advent of video art was an accusation. Writing in the academic arts journal October in 1976, critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss asked whether the “medium of video is narcissism?” Rejecting the notion that video art can be defined by physical mechanisms — such as painting being a medium made of pigment — and instead opting for a psychological model of interpretation.
Starting with Vito Acconci’s Centers (1971), which saw the artist pointing to the centre of the television for 20 minutes, Krauss suggests that this mis-en-scène establishes and “typifies the structural characteristics of the video medium.” Meaning that a pictorial canon is set and which will be repeated, ingraining narcissistic tendencies into the medium itself. To build the foundations of her case, she folds in works such as Lynda Benglis’s Now (1973) and Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s Boomerang (1974), expanding the various permutations by which an artist may interact with their own image via the configuration of video camera and tv monitor.
In the case of Boomerang, Holt was equipped with a headset so that she could hear her own words repeatedly delayed by less than a second. As Holt commentates, “I am surrounded by me and my mind surrounds me… there is no escape” to which Krauss expands a structure of imprisonment that replicates the conditions experienced by Narcissus. She calls it “the prison of a collapsed present,” in which the present moment becomes severed from the continuation of time, from its past and from its future. This combination of absorption and isolation created by an integration of technological apparatuses — the “spatial closure” — becomes analogous to the sheltered and still pool of the myth. Beyond the reflection or echo no other presence can enter and the subject cannot leave.
Performing in attempted synchronicity with an earlier recording of herself, Benglis’s Now adds an “auto-erotic” element to Krauss’s case. On the left-hand-side facing right a recording of Benglis appears on a large monitor, making her slightly greater than life size. Whilst on the right, the ‘live’ Benglis faces left and tries to mirror her earlier actions. As one face contorts or a tongue protrudes the other attempts to replicate. A command or a question may be issued, “Now!” or “Is it now?,” with a growing ambiguity as to which version is speaking. By struggling to become her own mirror, Benglis seeks the mythical entombment of the Narcissian waters.
Citing Freud’s definition of narcissism — marked by a shift from object-libido to ego-libido — the psychological situations of these early video works are to Krauss emblematic of pure narcissistic tendencies. Though to present a counter interpretation, the circumstances explored are rarely true immediate mirrors. A fraction of a second audio delay or the time elapsed between one video recording and another, interject a space of interpretation that Narcissus was never granted. Mistakes in the mirror signal a transformative potential that itself recalls Narcissus’s surprise at meeting an image both like him but unknown.
Thirty-plus years after Krauss’s essay, a post-internet wave of artists with intimate awareness of- and relationships to networked camera technologies would continue this transformative trend. Owning a legacy to the video practices of the early 1970s they would stare deeply at themselves on their laptop and desktop computer screens, the slight misalignment between their webcam and their virtual eyes becoming a noticeable hallmark. Amongst them would be Petra Cortright and Molly Soda — both featured in the exhibition this essay attaches itself to — alongside Erica Scourti, Ann Hirsch and to an extent Amalia Ulman. More recently Maya Man — also featured — would hijack users’ webcams through a browser extension, expanding the performative arena.
Born from and reflecting the conditions of an adolescent bedroom, works from this period are frequently diaristic and play upon emergent video blogging practices. In Soda’s recently completed 97,612,436,291 bytes (98.43 GB on disk) for 15,108 items (2014–2021), the artist sets her PhotoBooth library to play seven years of personal image capture. The explicit weight of imagery stated in the title barely able to convey the experience of watching personhood unfurling and evolving. Scourti’s Life in AdWords (2012–2013) achieves a similar compression of lived experience, though presents its record at the end of a black-box conversion. For a year the artist wrote diary entries on Gmail and emailed them to herself, each day’s suggested adwords were then read aloud to her webcam. Performing her suggestions with an apathetic distance, Scourti articulates the mechanisms of algorithmic surveillance as well as our day-to-day inoculation from these processes.
Engaging more theatrical performance models and recalling seminal work by Cindy Sherman, Hirsch and Ulman create characters representing narcissistic social media tropes and figures. Acting the part of a “hipster college freshman” called Caroline, Hirsch’s Scandalishious (2008–2009) was an eighteen month performance comprising YouTube videos and comment based interactions with her audience. Adopting and contributing to the development of the medium’s conventions, Hirsh’s performance was in-situ and from the outside would be hard to distinguish from the ‘real thing’. Similarly Ulman’s Excellences and Perfections (2014) would fool an audience into believing the artist had abandoned her ‘path’ and was instead buying into a common consumerist fantasy. Staged on Instagram the performance required a blend of make believe and reality, though she only pretended to have had breast enlargements she was committed to the Zhao Dha diet. Not strictly a work using the webcam, Ulman represents a shift towards smartphone based praxis and new formats of social media image making.
Whilst the technological feedback loop that Krauss critiqued was formed between a camera, the artist and a monitor, the closed systems these artists work with frequently break their own boundaries. Using networked ecologies and social media services, their practices immediately meet new audiences. For Scourti that audience is an intimate two-way exchange with an algorithm, subtly hinting at her data’s wider parcelled application. But for Soda, Hirsch and Ulman the exact nature of their audience is only hinted at by followers, comments and views. Its true nature is always partially obscured. This results in an unstable redefinition of the mis-en-scene, no longer is the image contained by the edge of the frame, it is instantly and continuously expanding. A new performance paradigm emerges in which isolation and off-time is near impossible.
By virtue of these conditions, social media accessible works of webcam art can seem paradoxically representative of Krauss’s Narcissian prison and yet made with an unlimited audience in mind. They marry the insulated privacy of the bedroom with the exposed expanses of the net. Mirroring the demands of Instagram, TikTok and SnapChat transformation and newness become essential tools of retaining attention. The prison becomes a stage.
𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺
S is for SOCIAL MEDIA
It came as little surprise when The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook knew Instagram was toxic for teenage girls. Parents, teachers and teenage girls themselves could tell you the very same thing. Any idea that the tech giant wasn’t aware runs contrary to their continuous and in depth analysis of our behaviours. In fact cycles of toxicity and addiction are likely consistent with their business model.
Amongst the revelations, internal documents studied by the Journal showed that “social comparison was worse on Instagram” due to its heavy focus on body and lifestyle, and that of teenage girls who reported suicidal thoughts Instagram was a factor for 6% in the US and 13% in the UK. These types of findings have been replicated in academic investigations into the use of social media, selfie editing and body dissatisfaction. For example, a 2020 study by Tiggemann, Anderberg and Brown at Flinders University in Australia studied the emotional responses of 130 women aged 18–30 having spent time editing a selfie. Time editing directly correlated with increased negative mood. Similarly a study from Pforzheim University showed a positive association between selfie editing and social media addiction.
As concern around these trends have grown, technology companies have worked to reposition themselves as being conscious, considerate and seen to be implementing positive changes to reduce addiction and harm. In 2019 Facebook tested hiding the number of Likes a post received to improve users’ mental health, seemingly inspired by Benjamin Grosser’s artwork Chrome extensions which ‘demetricated’ the service. Offering respite from polished, posed and edited self portraiture, the LA based artist Maya Man coded her Glance Back (2019 — ongoing) extension to capture users at unannounced moments. Once a day when opening a new tab the extension co-opts the webcam and takes an image, then prompting the user to answer ‘What are you thinking about?’ Foreshadowing the emergence of BeReal — a watered down smartphone version of the same idea — GlanceBack archives are often reshared on Instagram and TikTok, directly challenging the image cultures they promote.
Collectively artistic intervention, academic study and public awareness is mounting a challenge to the ingrained status of the selfie. Though it is unlikely to disappear from our social media services, it will potentially transform or find new socially positive configurations.
Less is known about the effects of AR face-filters. In the 2000s it was possible to use video software to add a pre-positioned effect onto a webcam feed — Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM (2007) shows us how it was done — but it wasn’t until 2015 when Snapchat launched their Lenses feature that these effects would be dynamically positioned in relation to the individual’s face. The initial seven filters were an immediate success and were swiftly followed by the integration of a paid for lens store. Instagram would counter by acquiring a Belarusian startup and adding augmented reality filters to their service in 2017, opening a new front of the arms race between the two companies.
Both parties added free creator software, Snapchat Lens Studio software was made available in December 2017 and Instagram opened their Spark AR Studio in August 2018. Though these tools would be used by artists, designers and other creators to produce their own filters, the launch of studios meant that brands would become increasingly present in this new self-image space.
In their paper ‘Augmented Reality Filters and the Face as Brands’ Ruggero Eugeni of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan identifies a tripartite typology of brand AR face-filters. These range from environmental atmospheres that immerse the users in a branded reality attuned to the company’s values and image; to the more directly commercial try-on that apply a cosmetic lens or clothing accessory; and finally the disguise which superimposes graphic elements onto the face, including slot-machines and living logos.
Through a mixture of these methodologies, companies are able establish deeper links with their audiences. Summarising several studies, Eugeni notes that try-on filters have been proven to enhance the “self-brand connection” and to “stimulate both the sense of belonging to the products virtually tested” and the “artificial image of one’s own body.” Creating for users “augmented selves” that are positioned to “renegotiate the gap between the current selves and the ideal and desired ones” with the help of the brands. Contiguous with the marketing strategy of selling a lifestyle, AR face-filters reinforce the notion that certain products are the correct pathway to a desired result. For Eugeni, this developing relationship with the brand is best articulated by a shift from being ‘branded selves’ to becoming ‘selfed brands’.
Furthermore, it becomes plausible that with increased use of branded AR face-filters the desired self is tied to an augmented reality, creating a reliance on the filter and feeding the addictive patterns recognised in broader studies of social media. Though a solely pessimistic appraisal of these technologies fails to see other potentials they contain.
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K is for KALEIDOSCOPE
Motivations for using AR face-filters are not the sole domain of cynical corporate strategies. Published in the journal of Computers in Human Behaviours, the University of Bristol authored paper ‘What lies behind the filter?’ hypothesised a number of rationals and via a study of 536 UK residents — over the age of 18 and having used Instagram face-filters in the last month — narrowed these theories to a supported set of positions. Highly ranked amongst these were three modes of self presentation: True, Ideal, and Transformed, which collectively suggest a more nuanced relation between the individual and their augmented self.
To briefly expand upon these versions of self. The researchers explain that “despite modification” the True self is a representation that through filters is “congruent” with “one’s authentic nature,” whilst the Idealised version is how the user “would ideally like to be”. Drawing a concise line between these two positions may prove difficult and there is possibility for fluctuation, though we may assume the latter to fall in the cosmetic paradigm. Finally the Transformed self refers to the process of experimenting with new “possible selves,” with the user engaged in a cognitive process of discovery that may circle back to become the foundation of a newly refined True self.
Considering this system, the categories of True and Transformed relate to what we would like to term the ‘kaleidoscopic potential’ of augmented reality. Externalised systems that permit fluid experimental permutations of identity that need never be fixed, leading to an increased acceptance of lifestyles in flux. Aligned with the increased intersectional diversity of younger generations, these tools can become meaningful lenses to engage with the continual construction of selves. A means of ongoing questioning, which implies that the Truest selves and the selves that accept Transformation.
Whilst the Bristol team’s research does suggest that play with the Transformed self is more often private than made public, they did relate published representation of the True self (which we would emphasise the Transformed may feed in) to increased levels of self-acceptance and positive mood. Moreover, they warned of simplistic readings of AR face-filters that identify self-presentation as being “synonymous with self-enhancement,” i.e. the use of cosmetic filters.
Addressing the face-filters presented within I am surrounded by me, we see an explosion of aesthetic forms and thematics which correlate to and expand the notion of the Transformed self. Including works by Ines Alpha, Balraj Bains, Sian Fan, the art collection Keiken, Huntrezz Janos, Panta X Ray and a collaboration between Tiare Ribeaux and Qianqian Ye, the filters touch upon ecological, post- / transhuman and spiritual concerns, and manage to comment upon the culture of filters whilst remaining true to the medium’s playful essence.
Take for example Bains’s TruSELF (2019) filter which layers a milky blue mask over the user. Unannounced the filter breaks expectation by splitting along a vertical axis to reveal their ‘original’ face, interrupting and contradicting its own expected behaviour. The achieved effect is comparable to the ‘split-view’ option found in photo editing software that allows the proposed application of a transformation to be compared against the original. A foil to the promise of cosmetic filters, Bains seems to be reminding us of the impermanence of these masks. Paired with this, X Ray’s filter Senseless (2022) and its performance in the exhibition’s context seems to hint towards the everyday application of the technology. Whilst tying her hair back and finalising her outfit, the filter pulsates across the artist’s face, yet receives no inspection as if it has become totally normalised. A possible instance of the shift from the Transformed to the True.
Elsewhere filters are used to envelope the user in contemplative reflections on the ecological. Part of their Kai 海 Hai (2021 — ongoing) project, Ribeaux and Ye’s filter Hina (2021) and it’s AR object counterpart Nakili (2021) take inspiration from the living Hawaiian deity of corals and spiny creatures. Texturing our faces with an arrangement of coralloid growths, the filter is intended as a reminder of our interconnectedness with the ocean and with the living creatures that call it their home. Asking us to reposition of relation to the natural and alter our behaviours accordingly. Featuring similarly liquid aesthetics, Alpha’s filters frequently refer to ocean flora, with sea-anemone and -weeds adorned as if they were elaborate jewelled headdresses. Akin to Hina, her Alpha Beauty Booth (2021) filter slowly accumulates across the face, rewarding a slower pace of interaction and a gradual submergence into the oceanic. Although some may question whether filters can affect change, scepticism needs to be measured against the reach of these mediums and their innate intimacy.
Continuing this vein of speculating alternate futures, filters such as Ozone (2020) and Cosmos (2020) by the collective Keiken connect us with our surroundings and postulate post- or transhuman positionalities. In Ozone a transparent glaze washes over the face, merging a second impression of the camera feed that warps the user into their environment. Recalling beauty face-filters and the French artist Orlan’s surgical work, Cosmos adjusts the nose, lips, cheeks and most prominently the eyes. The result evaporates boundaries between the human and animal and interjects the alien. Much like their series of metaverse films and interactive media experiences, these filters envision a collapse of barriers around the distinct category of being ‘human’, offering and encouraging us with a sample of this possible reality.
Filters also offer the possibility of entering into the subjective position of the artist’s True self through processes of Transformation. Part of her in-real-life and online performance piece Conduit (2020), Fan’s filter maps a generative pattern and Chinese symbolism onto her face, matching her physical appearance with that of her custom digital avatar, whose face is ‘naturally’ embellished with these details. Through the use of the filter Fan suggests a narrowing distance between our digital selves and our physical selves, mediated by intermediary augmentation technologies. And last but by no means least, the complex animal, architectural and symbolic arrangements of Huntrezz’s wearable filter headdresses offering fantastical celebratory expressions of distinctive identities. Their Coronet Crocodylia (2019) mixes a necklace of mardi gra beads with a crown of spiked links, additionally adorned with a pair of crocodile earrings. A piece of maximalist surrealism the filter appears autobiographical and yet defines easy interpretation. Moreover, unlike Fan’s singular True self, Coronet Crocodylia is one of an ongoing body of Transformations that the artist can switch between at will.
Through the multitude of selves these artists make available, users are able to directly engage with artworks committing themselves to more empathetically potent relationships. A kaleidoscope of options become available and by the virtue of their playful integration into social media systems the selves they come to represent are sharable. Encouraging a kinetic memetic domino of interaction. A widening ripple of experimentation and imagined futures.
𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺
CLOSING WORDS
Overtly ambitious, this essay has attempted many things and only offered a teaser of the depth each conversation truly requires. We hope to have reclaimed Narcissus from narcissism; to have refuted Krauss’s convictions; hinted at the canonical connections between video art, webcam performances and AR face-filters; and surveying the pros and cons of social media establish these technologies as a kaleidoscopic tools for the continual reimagination of the self. Many of the claims may seem far fetched, however, before casting definitive judgement we would ask any unconvinced reader to spend time with some of the mentioned filters and, beyond what we are able to say, allow them to inform your thinking.
𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺 𓁺
