Essay by Hang Ling, one of the curators of For the time being, a performance commision for Snapchat platform, for which I made work last year reflects on the issues surrounding the place of art within online platofrms.
networkcultures.org/blog/publication/video-vortex-reader-iii-inside-the-youtube-decade
“Tamara Kametani’s what will be? broadcast clips extracted from the daily news.
The clips were superimposed with filters and digital stickers to encourage ironic
interpretations of what was happening in the real-life. For example, a photo of Kim
Jong-un was overlaid with a cute baby filter, for which the artist also chose a digital
photo frame decorated with cute bears, and a line said, ‘It’s a BOY’. On this post,
Kametani wrote the following headline: ‘North Korea fires 2 missiles’. The effect
of such subjective, witty social criticism was strikingly distinct from the solemn,
authoritative voice of news publicaitons like Politico. Aside from international
politics, Kametani also ridiculed surveillance technology. Posting a surveillance
camera shot of a flying pigeon, she wrote: ‘Pigeon flying over the speed limit in
30km/h zone in Germany is flashed by a speed camera’. Through evocative visual
and textural connotations to news, the artist seemingly brought the role of the
artist as a social critic into the social media context. Social media photo-editing
appeared to provide a chance for Kametani to construct a simulacrum wherein
live happenings are mirrored and layered with emotions, mockeries and biases.
No intention can be found in those works to tilt those subjective expressions into
authoritative representations.”
