ESSAY - “The Online Persona - Navigating The Digital.”

Chelsea-Anne Salter

MA Fine Art FT

UCA Farnham

“The Online Persona - Navigating The Digital.” The project follows an autobiographical journey through the discovery of sexuality online and on social media, and how that behaviour bleeds into the real world, from the point of virginal curiosity. The fantasy elements of romance, often inspired by the safe worlds of romance novels and artworks, are juxtapositioned with the harsh reality of being a woman online through screen prints, texts and screenshots. It aims to communicate and explore the result of online culture, and the consumption of a female body in the digital world through an autobiographical lens. The aim of this project is not to project a viewpoint, nor create a negative light on the internet, or the senders of the messages within this project, but rather to open the room for discussion when it comes to online culture, interaction and behaviour. When it comes to the digital work of this project, the research jumps between two main theories with artist inspirations and curational ideas peppered through, one theory is the online disinhibition effect suggested by John Suler in 2004. The cyber physiological concept describes the loosening of social restrictions and inhibitions that are normally present in live interactions, during online discourse (Mazzola-Randles, 2020). The reasons for this can be broken down into six subsections; “dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority”. (Suler, 2004). Secondly is the theory of Dibbell’s 1993 “A Rape in Cyberspace” which bought the issues of online abuse to light at a time when it was very much on the back burner of social issues. This sparked the debate of whether these events have real-world repercussions, as the users' psychological damage is real. (Buck, 2017) As Dibbell immerses himself in the virtual world, the two cannot help but mix, which is something almost everyone can relate to in the current digital age. Experiences from virtual reality bleed into Dibbell’s real-world thought process. Figure One “Glitch Me” - 2022 (Installation View) Figure One shows an installation view of “Glitch Me” (2022) as part of the public exhibition “Decrypt” located at the Crypt Gallery in London in 2022.“Glitch Me” consists of two A0 prints faced towards each other on opposite walls in order to create a discourse. The lighter-coloured image is set on a black wall and the darker image on a white(er) wall in order to make them stand out further. Both represent online personas and the anonymity of the avatar online. Within the project, “Glitch me” took the first steps into playing the digital profile that users attach to in order to represent themselves. Besides the arbitrary colours and shapes, nothing about the person behind the pixels is known. In the book C’lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, Katrien Jacobs investigates the role of digital media in “rewiring sexual desires and animal responses to internet pornography” (Jacobs, Janssen and Pasquinelli, 2007) suggesting one’s online life is more important or satisfying that our real - that is to say physical - life, this further solidifies Suler’s theme that ones online “space” is “a territory that is part me, part other, and that provides a venue for self-expression, interpersonal discovery, play, creativity, and, unfortunately, the acting out of psychopathology.” (Suler, 2016) as well as dissociative imagination. Additionally with the use the filters the image may not even be accurate to the represented person, acting simply as an avatar to disconnect mentally and connect digitally with, linking to Jacob’s theory. Additionally, referring to pornography in particular although the idea can be extended to online sexual discourse and unsolicited messages it can be suggested that avatars are simply “cataloguing all the variations (of desires) treating the human bodies as interchangeable parts in machines” (Tierney, 1994). Ultimately this can suggest that the person behind the screen is almost irreverent to the needs of the sender, as it's the reaction, not the person the sender is connecting to, completely reducing them to simple pixels on a screen. Figure Two - “Untitled” (Scroll Work) - 2022 In a nod to Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, which is described by the author, as "the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began" (Willshur, 2014) Figure Two shows a section of online messages written out on a scroll. This “impureness” is ironic considering the content of online messages that have been collected for this project. Linguistic understanding is vital to this project as a social experiment to understand the entitlement and language of digital anonymity when it comes to direct messages on social media. The quotes come from a single fortnight of direct messages from my Instagram, some conversations lasting here hours to a few days before the sender was blocked. Not every message is transcribed only the impactful ones create a completely undesirable transcript. To quote Laurie Penny: “the ideal woman is fuckable but never fucks”. Even from a linguistic level sexism is all too clear: every derogatory term for a promiscuous person is gendered. (Penny, 2014) For example, “whore” which can be seen frequently in handwritten pieces as well as work such as “Incoming Messages” refers only to a woman. If it is used for a male, however, the prefix “man” is added before the term to separate it from the traditional female reference; “woman-whore” just sounds redundant. It’s possible to compare Lakoff to Penny in this sense as she suggests a difference between the language used by women and language used by women (Lakoff, 2004), which both play into the dialogue of the project. Reflecting on the project by looking at online discourse and how one is affected and interacts with unsolicited messages, the idea of just “log off” or “delete the messages” have come up a lot, although denying one the use of the internet due to some bad apples causes more harm than good. Similarly, describing Penny’s book she states; “At the same time, I wanted to challenge the growing idea that the internet is somehow bad for women - that technology itself, rather than the antiquated attitude of some of the people who create it, is the real problem. To me, telling women and girls to stay off the internet and shut down their social media profiles if they don't want to be harassed is just like telling us not to walk or travel alone if we don't want to be assaulted. It's not just victim-blaming, which is bad enough, it's direct behaviour policing – it's telling women and girls that we're not wanted in public space and in places of power, and if we go there, we've only got ourselves to blame if something horrific happens.” (McRobie, 2015) Figure Three - “Incoming Message” - 2022 (Video Still) Being that the messages and the communication came from an online platform it seemed only right that the presentation of the work should also reflect that, to make it more realistic for the audiences to sympathize with the themes of online discourse. To change the discourse about the hidden identity behind the screen Figure Three shows a screenshot of the video “Incoming Message”, it de-pixelates the model, showing exactly who is behind the camera without the comfort of makeup or filters showing her as a computer user, deeply immersed in her “internet experience” via her webcam. Set in a domestic neutral setting, the audience can relate to the frankly unimpressive plain girl in front of the camera that looks nothing like her online persona. Messages type across the screen reflecting the blue and white colour theme of SMS text messages. After all, computers font just for things for us, they do things to us, including our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people. (Turkle, 2011) Incoming Message explores the direct ideas of the disinhibition effect as it explores the freedom, (read audacity) that people practise online when it comes to discords. Additionally, avoiding eye contact and face-to-face visibility disinhibits people, text communication, as highlighted in “Incoming Message” offers a built-in opportunity to keep one’s eyes averted (Suler, 2004), and therefore by including the gaze at every step “Incoming Message” aims to take back power on a subconscious as well as literal level. The text not only gets typed out in live speed but retracts before the next line is typed and retracted again like a shore breathing over a beach. Not only does this mimic a reading speed but also suggests a deleting of a “risky” message before it is sent, although, it is important to note that the project relies on these messages being sent to highlight the audacity of online anonymity, despite this the methodology of squirming these messages does not invite or intimate any sexual themes and waits for the sender to reveal their intentions naturally. Unlike Figure Two, the transcript in Figure Three is verbatim from direct messages, including the repeated and mundane small talk to add to the realism of online discourse. I have seldom found, in regards to Instagram, that messages go straight to graphic and vile, preferring perhaps to “test the waters” to try and determine how far they can enact their solipsistic introjection. That is to say, the lack of face-to-face cues and real-time feedback between people can lead to fuzzy self-boundaries. (Shukla, 2021) The videos are candid, un-calculated, real-time, and almost performative as the artist can be seen looking over her screen, the audience wondering what she sees, which are accompanied by muted distorted sounds of domestic life in the background: the tv, the family talking, the drone of the fan. The video starts with the artist simply viewing the screen before mild messages such as “How are you beautiful” type across the screen, to brace the audience, before less PG-rated messages appear such as “I wanna see your face and pussy” and “hey slut”. This documentary of real-life conversations and publishing the private conversations are inspired by Natasha Caruana’s “Married Man” who documents and records, both literally through photos and mentally, the experience of 80 dates she went on. The occasions were made online through dating websites designed for married men to conduct affairs as if she is setting a trap and questions why a taken man would risk it all for a date. For example in one photo, a man pays for a meal in cash- so that no evidence is left for his wife to discover, an old battered table in a tired pub suggests the ‘date’ has little concept of romance. (Caruana, n.d.) Caruana’s work is concerned with the ethical issue of posting one secret life, the screenshots and identifying features of my senders will not be made public, as does the project, although having the video online and other documents accessible through QR codes and active audience participation, the messages are not in direct public view, rather they need to be worked for slightly.

Figure Four and Five - “Untitled” (Facial Recognition Experiment #1, #2) 2022 (Digital Screenshots) Figure Three includes the detritus of online interactions that have appeared based on my appearance, gender and estimated age, although, taking this a level further the project has gone deeper exploring how AI as long as strangers perceive a subject online. Using the same point of view as the Figures before, the series in Figures Six and Seven uses facial recognition software to determine (read “allocate”) an identity based purely on only a physical image, the same information as one would receive on social media. The results were vast and differed depending on if the artist smiled, wore headphones or covered part of her face. None of the results however were true to her intended identity (female of 23 years), and the image might as well be pixelized like “Glitch Me” as identifying features don't seem to add anything information-wise for the viewer. The identity, which is what makes the person, is still unknown and plays on the idea of online anonymity. It was interesting to see an estimated emotional range that is not taken into consideration when it comes to online discourse according to Suler. Having said that facial recognition has boomed in popularity, especially in online discord in regards to Snapchat filters and Instagram reels. This links to the pressure of social media to fit in, as explored in The Dove Self Esteem Project which combines their work with leading experts with a vision of a world where positive body image equals positive self-esteem, and beauty is a source of confidence. (Our Mission, n.d.) Figure Six - “Online Persona”- 2022 (Digital Poster) Linking back to the image-based section of this project, the use of a photo ID image in Figure Six acts as the base layer relates to the idea of advertising oneself to the world. Having said that, like a post on social media, a person's “true self” is unknown and similarly, a business card presents an “ideal” viewing of oneself for a potential boss to assume and create a character from. The larger-than-life print also makes comments on how a woman's body is a “consumed” product online. One of the outcomes of these social media platforms has been the phenomenon of online self-representation and the self-authoring of sexuality by women. Self-authored sites feature individuals showcasing themselves, and their everyday lives, actively producing versions of their sexuality, even if how they do so may mimic some of the codes established in other media platforms. (Bhattacharjya, 2022) Which is a theme that weaves itself through the project in different forms. Inspired by the work of Gillian Wearing, in particular her ‘Pin-up’ series of 2008, Online Persona violently overedits the woman, in an attempt to fit in with the culture of fitting in. While Wearing is interested in examining the difference between our public and private personas, and how we express—or conceal—our dreams and fantasies, the project looks at the private vs reality in the field of digital immersion. Additionally, she doctored the images in Photoshop to express the often unrealistic physical proportions—long legs, unfeasibly large breasts, tiny waists—that appear in glamour shots. (10 Contemporary Erotic Artworks From Some of Today's Most-Known Artists, 2019) Figure Seven - “Lipstick” -2022 (Video Still) Despite Figures One hidden identity, focusing on the fact that behind the pixels the sender does not know the individual, within online discourse the sender unconsciously “allocates” a character to the individual. This character is shaped partly by how the person actually presents him or herself via text, but also by one’s internal representational system based on personal expectations, wishes, and needs. (Suler, 2004) This explains why such comments often sound demanding and entitled in their audacity. While appearing innocent and cute at the beginning the experimental video, which is one of a series of inherently innocent videos, explores the idea of unsolicited sexualization online, particularly involving women doing completely normal things. Figure Eight shows a screenshot of the minuet video “Lipstick”, as an intended poster. The video purposely hides the area of sexualization behind over-the-top, colourful, innocent filters and stickers, while ironically bringing attention to it. It might not be clear to the audience what sexualisation is, but these video experiments aim to playfully deny the audience of sexualization. In “Lipstick”, the reason for censorship is the perceived sexual nature of a woman painting her lips in red. The media and film have made the red lip annoyingly sexy as well as the attention it brings to the mouth. Using dry humour, the lipstick gif, which is free to use on the internet, gently thrusts in and out of its tube during the minute length. Its slow twisting and movement do nothing but ironically add to the hidden sexual tensions without being direct or crude. It is up to the audience to discuss whether the sly humour is either a coping mechanism or whether it is a commentary on what's uncomfortable about a woman online, but it just provides some comedy to engage with that thing that might be otherwise taken as offensive. Humour and dry comedy are very successful in contemporary art in order to get a point across without making light or mocking the theme the artist is focusing on. One practitioner of this is Sarah Lucas. Famous for her focus on largely focus on the provocative and darkly humorous, as well as covering themes such as sexuality, class and gender once quoted "I'm not trying to solve the problem. I'm exploring the moral dilemma by incorporating it" (Dexter, 2021), which is a point of view the project tries to take as well, as one single person does not a revolution make. In order to link the work back to the medium of online culture, “Lipstick” and its sister videos are ideally presented as through a QR code to the full videos on Vimeo. The QR codes and audience participation plays on the sexual themes of pop-up ads online and the trope of “hot singles near you” and “click here for fun. Similar to the work of Petra Cortright, “Glitch Me”, “Lipstick” and “Incoming Message” activity avoids the “money shot” and excludes any direct sexual context. Instead, they rely on innuendos, which further adds to the dark humour and social experiment of what it takes to invite online harassment when nothing is exposed or inviting. Furthermore, by having the audience view the video on their phone, there is a sense of intimacy and unintentional private voyeurism of having a woman “in” their phone, rather than on a public screen as if the audience “carries” the woman around, which can be considered a social commentary on femininity and the pressures to "fit in". While it's true that it is very little we can do to change our bodies to fit a socially constructed ideal (Urwin, 2016) it's important nonetheless to address the issues faced online. While it is true that as an artist in 2022 there's not much that can be done to “shock” audiences as everything, in a way, has already been said, although it feels it's important in a therapeutic way to take power back from any negative experiences online. It is not shocking per se that the project is just focused on, although the transcript within the videos is copied verbatim from the messages, with spelling mistakes and poor grammar included as a form of dark humour. This is not to make light of the situation rather or become compliant with it, but to create a space for discussion in regards to the woven social structure of women online. Linking this back to “Rape in Cyberspace” , the interaction with online media has become ubiquitous, making it harder to avoid the negative actions of "trolls" and harassers. (Eisinger, 2017)

Bibliography 

Figures 

Figure 1 - “Glitch Me” - 2022 (Installation View) 

Figure 2 - “Untitled” (Scroll Work) - 2022

Figure 3 - “Incoming Message” - 2022 (Video Still) 

Figure 4 - “Untitled” (Facial Recognition Experiment #1) - 2022 (Digital Screenshot)

Figure 5 - “Untitled” (Facial Recognition Experiment #2) - 2022 (Digital Screenshot)

Figure 6 - “Online Persona” - 2022 (Digital Poster)

Figure 7 - “Lipstick” - 2022 (Video Still) 

Bibliography

Artspace. 2019. 10 Contemporary Erotic Artworks From Some of Today's Most-Known Artists. [online] Available at: <https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/10-contemporary-erotic-artworks-from-some-of-todays-most-known-artists-56234>  [Accessed 21 July 2022]. 

Bhattacharjya, M., 2022. EROTICS: An Exploratory Research on Sexuality and the Internet. [online] Academia. Available at: <https://www.academia.edu/1762453/EROTICS_An_Exploratory_Research_on_Sexuality_and_the_Internet_A_Literature_Review?email_work_card=view-paper>  [Accessed 25 July 2022].

Buck, S., 2017. The ‘rape in cyber space’ from 25 years ago posed problems we still haven’t solved today. [online] Timeline. Available at: <https://timeline.com/rape-in-cyberspace-lambdamoo-da9cf0c74e9e>  [Accessed 25 June 2022].

Caruana, N., n.d. Married Man. [online] NatashaCaruana.com. Available at: <https://www.natashacaruana.com/married-man>  [Accessed 20 July 2022].

De Boer Gallery. n.d. Alex McQuilkin. [online] Available at: <https://deboergallery.com/alexmcquilkin/>  [Accessed 10 July 2022].

Dexter, E., 2021. Sarah Lucas: When Humour Happens, Things Get Good. Lecture Video Transcript. National Gallery Australia. Published 10th November 2021. Available at: [Accessed 20 July 2022]. https://nga.gov.au/on-demand/sarah-lucas-when-humour-happens-things-get-good/  

 Dove. n.d. Our Mission. [online] Available at: <https://www.dove.com/uk/dove-self-esteem-project/our-mission/the-dove-self-esteem-project-our-mission-in-action.html>  [Accessed 29 June 2022].

Eisinger, D., 2017. The Original Internet Abuse Story: Julian Dibbell 20 Years After ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’. [online] The Daily Beast. Available at: <https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-original-internet-abuse-story-julian-dibbell-20-years-after-a-rape-in-cyberspace?ref=scroll>  [Accessed 2 August 2022].

 Jacobs, K., Janssen, M. and Pasquinelli, M., 2007. C'lick Me: A NetPorn Studies Reader. Institute of Network Cultures.

 Lakoff, R., 2004. Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentaries. Oxford University Press. 

McRobie, H., 2015. Laurie Penny on Unspeakable Things. [online] Open Democracy. Available at: <https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/laurie-penny-on-unspeakable-things/>  [Accessed 4 July 2022].

Mahadevan, D., 2015. A Rape in Cyberspace Starred. [online] Digital Media. Available at: <https://blogs.brown.edu/divya-mahadevan/2015/03/02/a-rape-in-cyberspace-starred/>  [Accessed 25 June 2022]. 

Mazzola-Randles, C., 2020. Online Disinhibition Effect. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX8-5dLMQSw>  [Accessed 25 June 2022].  

Net Art Anthology. n.d. VVEBCAM Petra Cortright 2007. [online] Available at: <https://anthology.rhizome.org/vvebcam>  [Accessed 10 July 2022]. 

Penny, L., 2014. Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution. Bloomsbury. 

Suler, J., 2004. The Online Disinhibition Effect. CyberPsychology and Behaviour, [online] Volume 7 (Number 3). Available at: <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8451443_The_Online_Disinhibition_Effect>  [Accessed 25 June 2022].

Shukla, A., 2020. Online Disinhibition Effect: Why We Express More Online. [online] Cognition Today. Available at: <https://cognitiontoday.com/online-disinhibition-effect/#Benign_vs_Toxic_ODE>  [Accessed 15 July 2022]

Suler, J., 2016. Psychoanalytic Cyberpsychology. Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, [online] Available at: <https://www.academia.edu/25324118/Psychoanalytic_Cyberpsychology>  [Accessed 25 June 2022].

 Tierney, J., 1994. Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress. The New York Times, [online] Available at: 

<https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/09/arts/porn-the-low-slung-engine-of-progress.html>  [Accessed 25 June 2022]

Turkle, S., 2011. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York, NY.

Urwin, J., 2016. Man Up: Surviving Modern Masculinity. Icon Books Ltd

Willsher, K., 2014. Original Marquis de Sade scroll returns to Paris. The Guardian, [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/marquis-de-sade-scroll-120-days-sodom-paris>  [Accessed 29 June 2022].