Identity and Authenticity on Social Media: 'How to Take a Selfie' for Instagram with Artist Andy Kassier

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

Abstract

Selfies and posies dominate the social media platforms of the Internet as 'Social Photos.' They mean a new type of photography made ubiquitous by networked, digital sharing, that functions as a unit of social communication. Especially, Instagram imagery is social photography to the degree that its central use is more expressive than informational when the recording and documenting of reality is not its own end, but a means for communicating an idea or an experience. Since social media enables everyone to take, to publish and to distribute photographs and to receive instant feedback in the form of likes, hearts, shares, and comments as well as other kinds of visuals, a staging competition is underway today. The vast amounts of images of the self circulating on social media are not only a new visual language for current status reports and biographical storytelling but also always stand in competition with each other. Social photos are competitive images for the most effective resonances, which take their starting point in impressing, affirming, and emotionalizing. The social photo mainly functions as a strategic representation by creating effective new forms of staging.

The Berlin-based conceptual artist Andy Kassier examined them for an ongoing Instagram art project. With 'How to Take a Selfie,' he explores the pictorial world of the Instagram generation, focusing in particular on the self-portrayal and self-marketing of young men on the Internet. The desire for confirmation and recognition in social media has led to specific new role models for the Millennials and Centennials, which Andy Kassier recreates in front of the smartphone camera. In the act of performance and re-enactment, these become visible not only as image types and social categories but also lead to the question of what is real about this extensive staging culture on Instagram. The search for identity and the desire for singularity and authenticity are on the one hand a drive for the social photo, but on the other hand, there is always the suspicion that everything on Instagram is just a fake. For many today, however, the creative, self-fabricated in the image is the expression of an identity that no longer distinguishes between real and virtual, true and false. However, Andy Kassier's Instagram art project still struggles with the old question of what can be experienced as authentic in the digital representations of the Internet 2.0.