MFA Year 2 - Artist Talk

“Hello my name is Nancy Daly and I am from the Photographic and Electronic Media Program. These two pieces are from my current body of work called “Some Recent Activities”. Both of them are trying to examine how the development of the online social world is affecting identity and social behavior. By creating interactive machines reminiscent of out-dated technology, I hope to address the contradictions present in various social media that are once ephemeral and entirely permanent. At the same time I employ vocabulary of minimalist sculpture to challenge the viewer to view beyond the user-friendliness of online technology and think about what their participation of social-media means.

By observing how individuals reveal themselves through the process of utilizing social technologies, I am trying to explore what the message of each social medium is as a whole.

Missed Connections on Craigslist – A section on a website where people have an experience in the “real world” and they find it significant in some way and post it online in the hopes that someone else will see it online and respond back. All of this under the basis of romance. Each physical box I have created represents a post. Part of the box is laser-cut to create the outline of the text. The box is then filled with Crisco. The machines are a literal materialization of the narrative arc of the situation. The interaction with the machine is suppose to be a representation of a person thinking about it – viewing the post – which would make the Crisco come out then distort the text and destroy the meaning. The text is important to the piece; and the problem with the machine is that the more of an interaction the less visible the text becomes. To solve this problem I made the title of each machine the text of the Missed Connections. For example : “We had sex on the back of my Truck | m4w | 30 – Rosedale | What happened to you? We were talking and then I never heard from you again. Let me know what kind of car you drive and what kind of truck I have.”

Its a metaphor for this process and at the same time on a larger scale; its about the idea that these situations exist even if people don’t decide to put them online. Everyone has these random romantic encounters: you see a guy on the bus a couple times and decide that it is true love, someone that register for Pottery Barn for towels. These fantasies are built up, and the idea is that the initial event is always there, but we can never get back to it.

“Status Update” Its based on Facebook status. These machines when they are activated will begin to wind up the receipt paper that is on the scattered on the ground. The idea is that eventually all of this paper will be rolled up into these individual boxes. You can think of it as each box is a person on Facebook. The paper is printed with all of their status updates. They are printed from the very first post on Facebook to hypothetically their last post when they stopped using Facebook. As the paper rolls up, they become archived. This is the sort of thing that can happen once Facebook ends. All of this information becomes a permanent archive. It is a reference to other works as well : Hans Haacke “News 1969-2008”. Where he had an RSS feed of the main news stories and being printed as they were happening which showcased how all of this information is unending. Christopher Bakers “Murmur Study” – Tweets are printed on receipt paper and the idea is of the information being unending. But what I’m trying to do is get you to think about what happens when it stops. This isn’t an unending amount of information, what happens when people stop and lose interest? What happens to all of this information then? In the same way with the Missed Connections are always going to be there, but we can’t get to them. They are all being archived and even if we can’t access them someone else will be able to. This part of your identity is being stored somewhere to be used by other people in whichever manner that they want.