Facebook Status

Nancy has made Facebook portraits of some of her friends. In this case she printed out their Facebook statues on receipt paper. The paper itself will be completely unwound and through the exhibition it will wind itself back-up with the rotary machine she is building.

Critique:

Nancy’s personal assessment:

The paper roll is much smaller than expected
She tried to print the text horizontally and aesthetically it didn’t work out.
The aesthetics of it looking like ticker paper is important because it can be a mode of self-expression.
Receipt paper; it is becoming antique. Represent this mode of recording as becoming antique.
Facebook recording = spilling out endless stream of thoughts, maybe even non-thought. But the interesting part is after your identity on Facebook has been established you end up having a lack of control of your identity instead of more of it.
The rolling up would represent the passage of time. Which is the only order these status updates exist in.
Critique:
Class: Why on receipt paper?

Nancy Daly: I believe that “your” self-expression is mediated through advertisement. The more you write, the more the system tries to sell you things.

Class: Whose Facebook statuses would you use?

Nancy Daly: My Facebook friends, personal friends. But I don’t know if it truly matters whose account I print out. The problem is if I did for example, people that have died, I wouldn’t get across the message that to Facebook; it doesn’t matter. Whether you died or just stopped using Facebook altogether.

Matthew Buckingham: If the printing became a component, each piece/person is being added and rolled up. I would look at those time frames differently. The printing process comes before and it isn’t thought of, but having it printed would add another instance of time.

Travis Masingale: What is the purpose of mixing all that data that is representational of people at the beginning? Having all that paper on the ground waiting for it to be rolled up?

Nancy Daly: To Facebook, all of those things would be a record of some type. They are rolled back-up to symbolize time and a sense of mechanical archiving. “I throw all this out into the world and then I die” would be the trajectory of a person on Facebook. I’m interested in what happens to your information after that.

Craig Kalpakjian: The time of the rolling up seems arbitrary and that is problematic. It is a metaphor (the rolling) and having them as objects is more coherent. Why is the receipt paper on the floor? What meaning does it have?

Meg Rorison: It is interesting having the object representing something very abstract.

Lloyd Lowe, Jr.: The differences in representations of time are considered by the size of the roll and the speed they are rolled up.

Craig Kalpakjian: There are things to work out still and we can’t make the project for her.