Artist James Coupe recently launched his latest project, Today too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days, which was supported, in part, through 4Culture’s Individual Artist Projects program.
“This is the first art work to be made ‘inside’ Facebook. It runs as a Facebook application: all people who join the application participate in the art work. Every week, the work automatically generates a video and uploads it to YouTube and Facebook. The video’s narrative is algorithmically constructed from users’ Facebook status updates. Demographic information extracted from these updates is matched with a database of video portraits and clips from contextually relevant YouTube videos. The status updates that the project selects are typically from a number of different users, as the system seeks out the best combination of available posts until it finds something that can be considered a story.
The result is a collective narrative that dynamically evolves in tandem with the events, obsessions and dialogs that shape our lives. It approaches social networks as generative spaces in which personal, introspective reflections and public announcements combine with a broad fascination with the lives of others to build meaning from shared real-time, non-linear, simultaneous data.
Commissioned for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival, this is the first in a series of site-specific Facebook artworks by Coupe, exploring the relationship between voyeurism and exhibitionism inside social networks. Facebook status updates can be considered as a form of networked storytelling, through which we communicate what we do, and how we want to be seen. They are also a new form of voluntary self-surveillance, evoking Foucauldian concerns with the self-regulating effect of conscious and permanent visibility. ”
James Coupe
To receive updates from the project, including new videos as they are generated, subscribe to the YouTube channel or become a Facebook fan. To participate in the project, join the Facebook application.
Photo: © 2010, James Coupe Today too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days (still)
