Clinton with selfie-ing women. Photo by Barbara Kinney / Hillary for America. Tweeted by Victor Ng

Alicia Eler knows a lot about selfies.

Named a “selfie semiotician” in the November 2017 issue of Wired, Eler started writing about the cultural phenomenon in “The Selfie Column” for the arts publication Hyperallergic in 2013. Rather than join the deafening critical chorus condemning selfies and those who snap them as vapid or narcissistic, Eler asked contributors to include a sentence or two that contextualizes the images within the framework of personal experience.

The drive to understand #selfies and why people make them lead to Eler’s critique of the topic as a measure of overlapping issues including data mining and brokerage, online privacy, identity formation, and contemporary art practices. The product of that analysis is her new book, The Selfie Generation which was officially released on November 7th through Skyhorse Publishing. I spoke with Eler about selfies and the publication of her first book.

Interview by Roula Seikaly

PostedNovember 9, 2017

AuthorRoula Seikaly

TagsAlicia Eler, Selfie Generation, Selfie, visual literacy, new media, self portraiture, instagram, memes, Roula Seikaly

Watermarked Painting #436544659 (Shutterstock meta), 2016 © Paul Stephenson. Originally painted by Thomas Bond Walker, 1901 (Oil on Canvas)

While print is far from dead, most notably through the recent renaissance of photobooks in the past five to ten years, it’s a safe and obvious assumption that most of our interaction with images today occurs on screens. This pixel-heavy experience is at the heart of artist Paul Stephenson’s latest exhibition Forced Collaboration which includes three recent bodies of work: Watermark Paintings, Internet Paintings, and Reflection Paintings opening August 5th at London’s StolenSpace Gallery. For each of these series, Stephenson transforms nineteenth century paintings, purchased at various auction houses, into his own by graffiti’ing them with facial recognition outlines, watermarks from tech companies like Google and Shutterstock, and other symbols of digital interference.

PostedAugust 3, 2016

AuthorJon Feinstein

TagsPaul Stephenson, Watermark, Art HIstory, appropriation, StolenSpace Gallery, new media, Pictures Generation

Public Domain: London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company (active 1855-1922) - First published in Borderland Magazine, April 1896 — Public Domain: London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company (active 1855-1922) - First published in Borderland Magazine, April 1896

As a graduate student at The University of Delaware, Minneapolis-based artist Patrick Koziol drew a portrait of 19th century Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, and invited his fellow students to copy it like a visual game of telephone, or perhaps a tangential riff on the classic Exquisite Corpse. With Darwin and Wallace’s evolutionary theories in mind, Koziol’s intention was to see how interpretation might evolve or distort each artist’s representation of the original image when their only source material was the previous student’s rendering. Two years later, in November, 2014 Koziol, launched a new version of the experiment on Instagram, under the alias Reregrammer, and a new project was born.

Understanding the Selfie: An Interview with Alicia Eler

Watermarking a Masterpiece: New Paintings by Paul Stephenson

Destroying a Picture, One Regram at a Time