Entering the space of the interactive installation Anonymous Selfportraits/Anonymous Selfportraits, the viewer is confronted with a wall constructed of several hundred photos from dating sites. These photos function as window-portals referring to the fragmented signs of anonymous subjectivities scattered across the web.
A kind of performative matrix is created, which encodes and processes the images arranged within a mosaic structure. In the first contact with the installation, the photographs are unrecognizable; reduced to the form of miniature icons, they play an endless performance of the network. The entire event is controlled by an algorithm designed in the Max/Msp/Jitter environment, defining the contemporary condition of subjectivity. The algorithm randomly searches a photographic database, originally created by me from intentionally selected portraits, and enlarges the portraits by confronting them with the viewers’ eyes. The interactivity of the installation has been programmed – there is an active area in front of the video wall, where tracking of the audience’s movement is performed.
The algorithm positions the selected portrait each time in relation to the position of the viewer in the active area. In this way, the portraits, following the viewers, constantly activating new images, reproduce the strategy of pop-ups – pop-up windows of Internet browsers obtrusively trying to extract the presented content from the information noise of the Internet. By means of this procedure, I also realize the principle of “interactive subjectivity,” which only makes visible and doxastic in the act of interactively evoking it, as well as in relation to other networked portraits. However, this is programmed interactivity. The interactivity of an algorithmic network that is triggered by the presence of the viewer, but controlled by the language of digital computing. Information noise is also present in the auditory realm also generated randomly and constructing a sense of temporal suspension. The audience is introduced into an audiosphere woven of digital surges, couplings, crackles, as if it were residing in a looped time of incessant self-generated noise of logging in, making connections, launching pages, etc.
The installation conceptually – in artistic terms – was a play on our everyday situation of being networked. The tracking of web traffic – tracking potentially attractive content placement – page visits, image positioning – causes the subject to spread over thousands of connections made – it is docked only by the connections made. He is deprived of individuality, becomes anonymous, and his identity is built through the connections made on the network, which doocate him. The relationality that the installation implies thus also connects the recipient and the anonymous images in a network of programmed dependence, shaping a situation of mutual determination. Thus, the subjectivity of the recipient is coupled with a situation of choice, which is de facto an apparent choice; conditioned by the programmed network performance.