The unreliable image
Description
There exists a contradictory and dualistic nature to notions of safety and agency when it comes to self-expression on the internet. For many women of color and other members of marginalized groups, interactions on the internet provide highly flexible and open spaces for experimental self-making––in some cases, digital spaces can be safer and more accessible modes for self expression than IRL. In other cases, an internet user’s assumed anonymity within an omnipresent surveillance state can produce digital experiences that are filtered by fear, violence, and anxiety where members of oppressed groups are more at risk for potential dangers. Some of the conceptual questions this thesis considers are: How do artists consider this paradoxical tension between the digital space as one of potential freedom, and, at the same time, one of sinister control? How do digital images and their unreliability as they exist on the internet allow for transfiguring modes of self-expression? How can manipulated, distorted, pixelated, and low-resolution images serve to subvert oppressive structures through their unreliability? This project argues that contemporary artists Adriana Varejão, Hito Steyerl, and Rafia Santana use the genre of self-portraiture in their artwork to illustrate the unreliability of the image in processes of self-making in the digital age. As women artists of color, they have particular gendered and racialized interactions within digital spheres, and are consciously incorporating that subjectivity in their artworks.