HIGH SCHOOL

Chris Z., Never Going Anywhere, grade twelve. 

Cristina Pinton

During the winter months of the pandemic, our students were holed up indoors, in their classrooms and bedrooms, feeling uninspired to take new and exciting photographs. Not only that, but their Instagram, Flickr, and other social media posts increased tenfold as their world of access and interconnection through the internet expanded. This backdrop inspired me to create a conceptual project that didn’t require new photographs to be taken, but did invoke inquiry and hands-on studio time.

We began by looking at contemporary artists who use photography to share and comment about social media. Many artists today are making work about so-called influencers, and how social media suggests a one-sidedness and falsity to their lives.

The final artwork had to reflect a virtually constructed online persona, a statement about the public digital version of the student as reflected through their posted photographs.

We discussed Cindy Sherman and her adoption of personas and the idea that photography can be seen as a proof of existence. I showed students the work of Douglas Coupland and Amalia Ulman who also use photography for social commentary. We had conversations about mapping and tracking on social media and apps on phones. Students also brought up other issues about social media such as the use of facial recognition and how every button pressed stores information. This both inspired and scared them.

Aidan R., Tracking Posts, grade twelve.

I prompted students to collect (download and organize in a shared file) twenty to thirty of their social media posts—any appropriate image/photo they personally took that was publicly accessible on their social media accounts.

I discouraged students from choosing images based on emotional responses or subjective choices (of friends, favorite places, images well composed, etc.) and instead encouraged them to adopt a more analytical method in selecting their images, as if they were designing a computer algorithm that would select with a strict set of criteria that eliminated human subjectivity.

This furthered our discussion about where and how various aspects of our identity exist on the internet. Personal information is collected through our social media accounts, web forms, and other apps via geo-tagging, face recognition, tracking and metadata, and more. Students tried Googling their names and we talked about how publicity is finely focused and intimately catered to their personal “likes” and online purchases.

Hobie J., Pieces of Me, grade twelve. 

When scrolling through Instagram, I will get ads that are tailored towards my interests. Some of these ads are far off from what I like, but some of them I get right after talking about something. I believe that this online persona is not very real, and that you can change who you portray yourself as with a single click of a button.
—Lorenzo L.

Interesting questions popped up. Even if you are careful, a stranger can freely screenshot your image from a friend’s social media account. How do you feel about that? Images you share on any public platform can be dispersed, tracked, and that information bought, dissected, and used for other purposes. How do you feel about the domino effect and infinite versions of “you” that exist online? How can photographs you post be taken out of context, redefined, and yet still reflect personal moments in your life?

Lorenzo L., Infinite Views and Anonymity, grade twelve.

Using scissors, glue, string, hole punches, and cardboard, students created a collage using only the printed images they sent me. I randomly printed on card stock twenty of the images each student sent. If there were more than the required amount, I had to create my own set of objective parameters, going against my instinct as an artist to pick the most beautifully composed.

The final artwork, brainstormed, designed, and put together over three to four classes, had to visually reflect a virtually constructed online persona, a statement about the public digital version of the student as reflected through their posted photographs. These final collages successfully encouraged conversations about virtual identity as teenagers as well as new sources of ideas and art-making.

Student Quotes
I started by picking out specific photos on my social media. What I noticed is that not only are most of my photos related to hockey and baseball, but they all have faces in them. I chose thirty photos that all had faces showing in them. When putting these photos together I was thinking of how my computer would describe me through these photos. Like how the world sees what type of person I am. What I did was cut up many of these images vertically in different sizes. Then put them on a sticky board together, this shows the type of person I am through the eyes of a computer.
—Sean D.

I started with the idea of having two groups of unrelated photos juxtaposed together in one group. I took this idea further when I asked myself what this juxtaposition of photos said about me, and what these photos represented—what I put out there into the online world said about me as a private person and what someone could piece together (literally stitched together in my project) about me if they just looked at my online persona.
—Matthew J.

Cristina Pinton is the visual arts department chair at Avon Old Farms School in Avon,
Connecticut.
Social Media Self-Reflcetions