My phone is promiscuous, and jealous. I fall asleep with it, and wake up to it, but it is constantly giving away my information to others, and tracking my movements. Yet, it is my gateway to my network, my life. As the general consensus seems to be, as long as I’m not doing anything wrong, I am safe. Right?
A digital environment is a highly personalized and familiar experience, conditioned by our own interests and connections, but also by the platform interests which seek to maintain our attention. In this way a data portrait becomes not only the individual, but a conglomeration of other voices, relationships, people, and entities. This tension between hyper-individualism and continuous contact propels a necessity to self-examine, self-represent, self-market, and self-preserve, bringing about paranoid impulses to maximize yourself, and be the best possible you.
Incorporate Me brings together works that balance the anxieties and benefits of continuous connectivity within communications technology. Each work incorporates variations of the human presence to examine the double-edged status of the networked self through topics of ownership, data collection, intimacy, peer exchange economies, and technological conditioning.
A conversation overheard at a coffee shop, amongst the number of laptops and smartphones:
“do you follow?” And the answer, “actually, that’s my business.”
said the multi-million dollar data advertising CEO
said the curator following that artist whose work they’ve been obsessing over for months now
said your next employer, running your name through a search engine
