:: FotoFest POKE! Opening Reception ::
"The increasingly pervasive, user-created content of online social media - tweets, confessional video, status updates, online gaming - are these subjects for art? In online parlance a poke is a virtual gesture intended as interaction without any specific purpose, usually interpreted as 'hello.'"
POKE! a new FotoFest exhibition opening tonight, features eight technologically savvy artists who explore online social media and its evolving relationship with the public, the media, and art.
On view from tonight, September 10th though October 24th POKE! explores the inter-personal intentions of social media technology and the "nature of modern internet-mediated relationships with work that references" and uses source material from popular online social media websites such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Craigslist, and YouTube.
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Thursday, Sept 10th, 6-9pm
FotoFest 1113 Vine Street
FREE
[Follow the jump for artist information.]
The artists exhibited in POKE! work in both digital and analogue media, and the exhibition features two-dimensional framed works, video pieces, online projects, and installation works.
Christopher Baker (Minneapolis, MN) compiles a wall full of personal, diarist messages by teenage users of YouTube and Facebook. The wall-sized video installation is a cacophonous monument to the individual’s voice and the confessional nature of self-made video.
Curtis Mann (Chicago, IL) uses images from Palestine and other regions of conflict, gathered from image-hosting websites including Flickr. Mr. Mann uses these images, mostly tourist photos, as source material for his re-contextualized and heavily reworked prints.
David Oresick (Chicago, IL) uses video posted to YouTube by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to tell a tale, by turns contemplative and manic, where life alternates between roughhousing on base and exploding I.E.D.s on maneuvers.
Marivi Ortiz (Chicago, IL) stages re-enacted video documentation of her months-long, remote, intimate exchange with an older man via instant message video chat. Her paean to the voyeuristic impulse explores the nature of online relationships and the emotional risks involved.
Brian Piana (Houston, TX) has developed a web-project, Journal of the Collective Me, which singles-out tweets and status updates from the internet containing the word “me,” and presents them, devoid of any identifying information, in an endless journal of self-obsession.
Jon Rafman (Brooklyn, NY) has recreated himself as the perpetually smiling “Kool Aid Man” in the online world of “Second Life.” As the Kool Aid Man, Rafman explores as a tourist of sorts, climbing virtual peaks, exploring virtual canyons and visiting the seedy back alleys and sex dens of the user-created, immersive virtual world of the game. Mr. Rafman also shows another body of work in the exhibition, exploring Google Maps’ “Street View” option looking for extraordinary images - houses on fire, birds in mid flight, etc. - captured by chance.
Penelope Umbrico (New York, NY) obsessively appropriates images from Craigslist, where merchants selling second-hand televisions make unwitting self portraits of themselves. These images of TVs, branded with their owners faces, are reproduced life-sized and sold for the same price as their real-life counterparts, questioning the worth of the consumable (the TV) and the original (the photograph).
Lee Walton (Greensboro, NC) is a self described “experientialist” and uses the short, textual Facebook status updates of his friends and family as scripts for his video shorts depicting scenarios that are taken to absurdly literal extremes.
For more information on POKE! and other FotoFest Exhibitions visit www.fotofest.org.
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