How does it affect me when I search through online profiles?

101

Lisa-Maria Putzer

Three inkjet prints: 115×170 cm, 121×170 cm, 125.4×170 cm

How does it affect me when I search through online profiles? Can I distinguish between how a person actually looks in real life and how they present themselves on Instagram?

After almost seven years on Instagram I can say that I cannot say and couldn’t guess how much content is staged and put into a perfect light.

After documenting my consumption, I realized that Social Media played a huge role in my life because in fact I spent over two hours a day on it. If you’re annualizing it, I spent almost one month just being on Instagram searching through meaningless content and staged people.

Especially if you’re in my generation Instagram can have a big influence when it comes to self-confidence and the compulsion to compare. As I grew up with it I didn’t question whether the content was fake. I was not critical and didn’t see it from a different angle.

Self-reflection led me to realize that I feel inadequate and not good enough when I search through other people’s profiles. Especially when it comes to the female body and the idealization of it.

101 is a statement against the idealization of the perfect body on Instagram. The selected pictures are representing women who uploaded their picture with the hashtag “perfect body”. I put myself on top and ruptured both identities, the idealized body and myself.

A project made in the course

ELIZA & Frankenstein – Techtopian Image Narratives

Studio IMAGE | BA Major in Art Both enthusiasm and skepticism about technological developments have always been a powerful driving force of cultural discourse and practice. The question of how far artists can not only be inspired or repelled by technological developments but can also contribute to current social discourses has been discussed recently in numerous events, such as the symposium “Guest, Ghost, Host: Machine!” organized by Hans Ulrich Obrist and John Brockman (Serpentine Marathon, 2017). How do we individually as well as a society relate to technological progress? Will “culture surrender to technology” as claimed by Neil Postman in his publication Technopoly in 1992?
More projects by Lisa-Maria Putzer