Binaries are inside us too.
This interactive artwork invites the viewer to have a look at their self through the eyes of a camera. The camera projects this live image back to them on the projector which acts as a digital mirror, it then replaces your skin with images. The slideshow that has been created to replace the skin of the viewer is a compilation of images and screenshots that depict suggestions on how to change your self. When I talk about a person's self, I am referring to George Herbert Mead’s idea of constructed self. Mead explains self as a socially constructed object, something entirely made up of the internalisations of the world around us. Mead argues that we adjust our self, and this adjustment is the projection of our internalisations, allowing our self to be aligned with the world in a way which we see fit. The question that I have chosen and leading on from the last assignment asked me to interrogate the idea of binaries. The most common binary we see is the female and male gendered roles that we conform to and sustain.
In my artwork I draw from Amalia Ulman's works as she also explores and interrogates the constructed gender binaries. Her work, The Future Ahead, follows Justin Bieber's story of puberty in a lecture style, accompanied by slides. The video focuses on how people change their bodies, to match the self which we believe to be appropriate for us. This work follows just one celebrity, but it makes it obvious that these rituals and body projects that people take on are all too familiar. The act of adjusting our body to align with a self that is constructed is not something any person is able to negate. Both men and women perform these acts, assisting in revitalising gendered roles and imposing binary opposites.
In society there is great ability to conform to dominant constructions of gender. We have people like celebrities to compare ourselves with, and we can make sure we are still aligned to these gendered binaries through the constant revival of femininity and masculinity the mainstream media adheres to. This artwork takes screenshots of google search pages and highlights how easy it is to feel like we need to aspire to an ideal, to somehow finish our self off with just seven steps to be the most beautiful women, or it gives us ten traits that real men should have. I used the search pages of Google because it seems that in our modern society, Google holds all the answers. It feels as if we don't actually remember the content of these articles, but we remember the headlines. We remember that there are seven steps to being beautiful, that there are a certain number of traits men should have to be validated as real, giving us the capacity to believe we can quantify our traits.
The faces in the video that come up are morphed faces of popular celebrities who adhere to those binary constructions of gendered beauty. Miranda Kerr, Amber Herd, and Kim Kardashian, are just a few. All up there were 19 female celebrities and 16 male celebrities that have been chosen to be morphed together to make up one face. These two faces that appear in the video are representing our attempts of morphing all the things we believe are beautiful into our self, or onto our body. If we were to do this constantly, perhaps more people would to look like either of these two images. The chroma key allows the audience to view their face briefly turn into this perfect human, before it goes to the screen shots that I have taken from Google and other articles which show them how to become this person. These images turn up on the viewer's skin, something natural, but something we insist on changing regularly to fit into the binary of male or female. The camera projects onto the viewer a world which we internalise, the world which we don't always notice but is always there. It is blatantly obvious when we investigate the idea of binaries, but before then this culture appears to live in transparency. This artwork projects the internalised and rigid binaries of others which make up our fluid and malleable selves.
Aida Ruilova (2010) Goner, accessed 21st September, Available at:
http://www.ubu.com/film/ruilova_goner.html
Amalia Ulman The Future Ahead (2014) - Improvements For The Further Masculinisation of Prepubescent Boys, accessed 21st September 2016, Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/grpx7VW4qYU
Amalia Ulman (2014) Excellences and Perfections, accessed 21st September 2016, Available at:
http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/amalia-ulman-excellences-perfections
Butler, J. (2004) 'Performative acts and gender constitution' in Rivkin, R. and Ryan, M. (eds) Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing LTD, 900-911
Mead G. H, and Charles W. M, (1934) Mind, Self & Society From The Standpoint Of A Social Behaviorist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
