December 04, 2019, 4 PM
Many thanks to Jiwoo Kim & the artist Sooj Heo introducing our participants to the concept & program of DISKURS Berlin and guiding us through the group exhibition Show Me Your Selfie. The visit is part of the BAI Studio Program | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School & Arts Incubator.
Exhibition Dates: October 31 – January 11, 2019
Location: DISKURS Berlin
Opening Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 1 – 7 PM
Address: Novalisstraße 7, 10115 Berlin
Participating artists: Candice Breitz, Yeondoo Jung, David Krippendorff, Warren Neidich, Nina E. Schönefeld, Young-jun Tak, Li Zhenhua
“What if we ourselves are aliens? The Latin word ‘alienus’ means belonging to another, and here ‘another’ is defined as someone or something else that is set in a state of uncertainty. In the act of producing a self-portrait, most prolifically nowadays through the medium of a selfie, we transfer ourselves onto another subject that does not exist in physical reality. We become trapped in a space of our virtual reality and its social networks that are based on self-generated delusion and fantasy. We are becoming alien to ourselves.
Taking selfies embodies the principles of self-copulation with mobile devices in order to reconstruct an illusionary projection of the self into a new space. This kind of identity is now more than alive without ever being quite alive. Everyone has a past, a present, and a future, but not in the world of Instagram and other social media. Time vanishes in the era of digital immortality. Smartphones and other devices store all our biometric and behavioral data without any conception of the passage of time. Therefore, Google, Kindle, Amazon, etc. know more about you than you do. The perception of our identities often moves beyond who we really are today under the guise of a digital-immortal-being. How do we want to present ourselves and preserve ourselves? Yet there is no unique configuration of the self in the virtual social network realm, but only the phantom of the subject. In this context, a subject can only mime existence, while in reality, it is a being that has been detached from its body and exists in a new, not-quite-real, yet hyper-real space.
The project SHOW ME YOUR SELFIE uses philosophical frameworks to investigate the subjectivities of identity and aims to uncover the unreality of digital environments and the conceptions of self that they create.” (Text by courtesy of Jung Me Chai)
More information on the DISKURS Berlin Website.
