Who Are We? RealGirl261

This page sort of offsets all the weird fantasy characters by having it be dedicated to the real girl behind all the profiles, i wanted her to be surrounded by this pretty pastel bubble of the internet. Shes your typical Tumblr girl, into memes, TV and 90s nostalgia. You can also see the other profiles floating around her imagination as she views herself as doing no harm.

I originally had another idea for this page where it would be full of a bunch of really unflattering photos of myself i found while going through stuff for this project, a few of these images ended up on RealGirl261's Tumblr anyway.

Who Are We? The Devil

So like ive mentioned before the Devil character was all about online trolling and how a person might use that really horrible part of themselves as an escape online. I also mentioned how i was looking at creating this weird pale faced androgynous default avatar-esque makeup for the character. I tried out a couple of things and i found most inspiration from Yolandi Visser of Die Antwoord in the ugly boy video so i tried to recreate that for my photos. I had to create a little avatar for twitter so i used this black alien eyes tutorial from Phlearn and whitening skin tutorial from Retutpro.

Yolandi Visser in 'Ugly Boy'

my devil avatar

Once i had this avatar it was time to get tweeting, im actually not that rude or awful a person but i did try and got a few nasty tweets out on the profile which i then used collage style as the background for my NewHive page.

I originally had an idea to create a video where i would be dressed as the devil reading out tweets using one of those text to speech robot voice things but the time i would have needed to do all the video editing would have been too much so instead i created a gif of the devil in a bunch of different poses that it would cycle through to go in its place and i left out the sound because it would have been the only page which had any.

The gif was pretty easy to create i just used the various photos i had taken, all edited with the white skin and bug eyes and used the pop up window from the front page.

Who Are We? Aegle255's Not So Perfect Pinterest

Aegle255 was based around the health/fitspo community online. Based mostly around Pinterest which is very picture perfect and aspirational to the point of being homogenised and cut and paste engagement photoshoots, wedding invites, all that weird adult stuff.

I started this NewHive page with a nice picture perfect holiday snap from France that would act as background with a screenshot of my Aegle Pinterest profile thing, i kinda wish i had faked a larger follower count for this part to add to the fantasy.

 I made a bunch of fake pins for the NewHive page by taking screenshots of images i had pinned on Aegles profile and adding a few gifs which would be these nice aspirational pretty pins that turn into crappy images of real life, like healthy food turning into junk food or a nice holiday turning into a shitty staycation.

I also wanted to add the most cliche of pinterest cliches the inspirational quote, i made my own version.

I would have liked to have added a few extra pins to make it a bit more cluttered looking but i think it turned out alright.

Who Are We? NewHive Front Page

My first NewHive page is going to be a group photo of all my social media characters or 'tuplas' hanging out together like the paintings of the gods in olympus. I got all my photos sorted after a very long day so it was just a matter of getting them cut out and collaged together.

Just like with my Venus page i chose a large image for the background, in this case a nice landscape by Horatio McCulloch (not related). I wasnt sure if i wanted to use this as my background i was just getting something there for my characters to go on top of but its actually really grown on me.

Glencoe is about to get funky

I cut out all my characters in photoshop again, took a bit of time but you start to get used it and using the mouse in quite a precise way and just placed them on top of this image which again was made much more colourful.

you might be able to see my pretty passable photoshop edits of my ass Kim K style

At this point i wasnt totally sure what to do with the devil character, i hadnt been able to get a good full body shot but i had plenty from the shoulders up that i had used to make my devils avatar. I had this idea to create a pop up windowfor the devil to appear in, saying something annoying and trolling. I found this window someone had created on deviant art and used it to create my pop up window, placing my edited devil selfie on an illustration from Paradise Lost by Gustave Dore.

I quite like the way the trumpets form a spiky crown as well as symbolising this character being a loudmouth

I also added a cheeky little window which was an edit of an existing windows message found on google. That was the background image basically finished apart from a nice green smoothie radiating healthy energy floating in Aegle255s hand

On NewHive im going to ass this nice glitter gif i made with my own fair hand and thats it done :)

Who Are We? The Venus Hive

I started work on this newhive page because its the one i had the clearest ideas for, i wanted to reacreate a depiction of the goddess Venus but using my own photo in this weird kind of cyberspace world.

So i started by cutting out this lovely photo id taken at home in photoshop. I stuck a red filled layer underneath used the rubber tool to do an outline, the red makes it easier to see what your cutting out and the dropped cut out me onto a nice desktop background of clouds and water.

I messed a bit around with the saturation to give it a bit of a cyberspacey early 90s graphics look.

 

To make it more like one of the old paintings of the goddess Venus i cut out these cherubs from Cabanels Birth of Venus, flipped them and used the hue and saturation tool i used on the background to make them bright pink.

The Original Venus (The Birth of Venus, Alexandre Cabanel)

My Venus

Next job was to create a gif that looked like a photobooth window, i just took a screenshot of my photobooth window with lots of photos of me done up like venus, cut away all of the stuff i didnt need and made a gif in photoshop from a video also made in photobooth

 

Who Are We? Getting Ready For NewHive

Its onto making time, I've got pictures done for the physical representations of my profiles, this was easy to do for my realgirl and venus but took a bit more thinking when it came to the devil and aegle characters. I had looked at some classical art depictions of the devil but i felt that they didnt really fit in with what the image i was trying to create, so i thought about online anonymity and the default avatars you get on websites, those anonymous grey faces. Moving on from that i looked at sort of scary, sometimes androgenous makeup from the likes of Marilyn Manson, Mathu Andersen and Yolandi Visser before creating my own kinda androgenous anonymous default avatar thing.

Mathu Andersen

Next was the Aegle255 character which was also a bit difficult to figure out  because her whole character is less about her physical apprearance and more about the things that represent her, her healthy eating, her sunny holidays, smoothies, green juices and home decor. I had this image in my head of Rene Magrittes Son of Man, i liked the idea of an obscured face, i thought id use some nice tulips from markies for my own photo, i think i might obscure her further, or add more to get this idea that shes more about things than physicality.

Rene Magritte's Son of Man

Venus35813 was pretty easy i already knew what i wanted to do for her photos. I made a recreation of one of Kim Kardashians most infamous instagram posts as well as some lounging photos that i want to use to recreate a painting of the goddess Venus.

How to get famous on the internet, Kim Kardashian

Who Are We? Follow all my fake social media

Its been a strange few weeks keeping up all these different social media profiles and i have to say I've been getting really tied up in keeping up the pretense of these fake lives. Like i never realised how obsessed i would get with spending time on Pinterest and Instagram and the rush you feel when you get the likes within seconds of posting an image. The Aegle255 profile has been a bit frustrating, I've been getting likes on my Instagram posts but barely any followers, its been just as slow going for Pinterest and getting attention on Facebook. The whole thing makes me think about the social media i use in my real life and how little i post and how little people seem to care about it. I suppose its how my realgirl261 feels, having these profiles that are a false representation of yourself getting more attention, people caring more about a life carefully crafted with a filter put on than the real you. Its funny that its happening to me though and i know that after this project I'm probably gonna kick start my own instagram and stuff to chase that like high again. This resentment that realgirl261 feels might lead to the creation of devil45701, an outlet of frustration at these beautiful, happy, aspirational fakes she's made.

So if you want to look at (or even follow) any of my accounts here they are(more added soon):

Realgirl261 Instagram

Aegle 255 Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook

Venus35813 Instagram

Devil45701 Twitter

Who Are We? My perfect instagram life

The next bunch of profiles im setting up are for my aspirational health blogger Aegle255, named in part after the Greek goddess of radiant health. For this character i have to create the fiction of a perfect life and perfect health following the guidelines set out for the perfect instagram. Im also extending Aegle255 to Facebook, which in my opinion is a bit humble braggy and maybe tends to have an older user group as well as Pinterest which is the home of inspirational quotes, home decor and all your favourite gluten free vegan recipes.

This fantasy has some basis in reality though, ive been combing through my old holiday pictures to find some pretty pinteresty looking ones, i'll either post them for #tbt or pretend im currently in the french countryside soaking in the sun but i think the reality of doing this in the lovely Scottish May weather might be too depressing.

Who Are We? Becoming Venus35813

Tags from @jamiegenevieve

Ive set up my Venus profile and things have been going okay with it, i started off on instagram just getting a feel for it, figuring out what tags to use and how to get my profile noticed. When i was posting my first picture there were 67,542,303 posts in the tag 'makeup', 1,217,781 posts for 'brows' and 266,157,947 posts tagged 'selfie'. Ive found that one of the easiest and quickest ways of getting attention for a selfie is to tag a specific makeup company for example #mac has 9,733,947 tagged posts but #rimmel only has 669,731, gotta think strategically about tags.

I put a few selfies up, made sure to put in lots of tags and ive got quite a bit of likes and a few follows. Have to say im not totally sold on these images, i dont think they look quite enough not like me. Im gonna start again with some selfies directly based on the profiles ive been looking at for inspiration.

Who Are We? Creating Characters

I said before about the two characters i had ideas to create, an ultra feminine fantasy woman drawing inspiration from Kim Kardashian and classical depictions of the goddess Venus and on the other side of the coin a trolling devil spreading negative influence. To tie these two together i have a real girl in the middle, the one creating these profiles and ive come up with a fourth idea based on the trend of fitspo.

Fitspo or Fitspiration is basically a trend for using health advice, healthy looking bodies or healthy diet tips as a replacement for sexualised images of thin, presumably unhealthy women, sometimes this is known as thinspo and is related to eating disorders. I dont know how i feel about fitspo, on one hand its seen as the antidote to images of incredibly thin women we see in media constantly but at the same time but at the same time theres a clear lack of diversity in the images you see tagged fitspo, most of the time its the same slim women in a sports bra holding a smoothie. Theres a really good article on the Guardian called 'Fitspo: how stong became the new skinny' which actually explains it pretty well.

My own profile is going to be less about the body politics of fitspiration and more about the aspirational angle of the 'perfect instagram account' as written about on Man Repeller. Looking at my own social media im pretty sure i do follow a few of these people, the ones constantly shopping at farmers markets, having gluten free vegan treats, doing juice cleanses, hot yoga sessions, barre classes and candles, so many candles. I think for me this is going to be the most fantastical of my creations because i have to make my life look so much better rather than rely on what i can do with my body through makeup or photoshop.

Instagram @ameezydeezylemonsqueezy The perfect Instagram account

Who Are We? Some Fun Research

Ive been on a bit of a classical art kick lately for my research, looking at the similarities of the Kardashian/Jenners on instagram and depictions of the goddess Venus or just the way that classical art was how the ultimate female form was depicted and how Kim Kardashians selfies maybe arent so different. I found this project by Anna Utopia Giordano in which she photoshopped paintings of Venus to meet more modern day beauty standards, you can view all the images here.

Who Are We? Fake Profiles

Like i said before i got really interested by the idea of catfishing. I know its complete trash but the show catfish does make you think about the motivations people have for creating these fake profiles, its not often malicious just people who want to hide behind someone elses selfies to communicate with others. Are these people really fake? Are they more themselves because of the anonymity theyve been granted online and is it more about the way they are treated by the person talking to them judging them on the percieved beauty of a stolen photo rather than how they actually look?

In my project i want to create a series of fake social media profiles built around a central character who is the 'real' person. How is she going to use the internet to create a better version of herself and is this going to ultimately be a positive or negative thing?

Staring off with Instagram, Kim Kardashian is the most followed celebrity Instagrammer and she's even published a book of selfies. After being inspired by that article about her to look at classical art and depictions of the goddess Venus my first fake profile is going to be the Venus. She is the ultimate woman and symbol of femininity. I constantly see people on social media, usually Tumblr being called out for photoshopping womens bodies to make their asses bigger, even Kim K has been caught doing this. Im going to take all these beauty and body trends (Instagram brows anyone?) that have been in part due to Kims influence and warp my body into the Venus. This profile is all about being seen as attractive and sexual which could maybe raise someones self esteem but if the images you put out into the world aren't true depictions of your body or looks or aren't even pictures of you could this self objectification make you feel even worse?

My second character is a negative influence in my real girls life, The Devil. For this I'm looking at Twitter trolling, i found this really good article by Lindy West on the guardian about her talking to a troll who had harassed her on Twitter which you can read here. This character exists as self punishment and torment for my real girl, putting down the other characters.

These are my two main ideas for characters but i have plenty of other social media sites to look at so who knows what will happen.

Who Are We? Internet and Identity

Ive been doing a bit of research about social media and how it might help shape our identity or if we all use social media in some way to create a ficticious identity, always putting your best self forward, carefully choosing which selfies to put online, sharing pictures of holidays and special moments with a side of humble bragging.

Looking at social media i use, i found instagram pretty interesting seeing as its focused more on images than anything else. Looking at the top 10 followed instagram accounts there are 4 members of the Kardashian/Jenner family. A few weeks ago i read an article in a magazine by an art critic comparing Kim Kardashians instagram photos to classical art, it was really interesting but more than anything it made me wonder just how controlled and manufactured her social media is. Like is it really a coincidence that comparisons can be made between her photos and the old masters?

While i was researching this project something else came up on my social media Molly Soda posted on Tumblr about her project selfiexposure created on NewHive, this is all about how she picks and chooses which images of herself to upload onto different websites and when she releases this control how people react to images across different platforms.

Image by Molly Soda

Another thing i have been looking at is the idea of 'catfishing' this is when someone creates a fake profile using images of another person to communicate with someone online. Im pretty sure the term was coined after the film catfish which was then turned into a tv show and I've been watching a few episodes, you know, for research. For this project i want to look at the way one person can create a web of identities across the internet and whether this gives someone a sense of freedom not being judged on looks but personality, being able to tailor how they are perceived by bending the truth as much or as little as they want. Is this a positive influence in someones life? Is living a fantasy on the internet freeing or just leaving you more unhappy and constrained feeling in your own life?

Existential Questions and Feminist Protest

Now that the first half of the year is done and ive had a little break its back to the grind with two new briefs. The first is 'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?' from the title of Paul Gauguins' painting and the second is 'Protest' which involves making a paper based two dimensional thing.

Some ideas ive got for the first one are more related to the what are we and where are we going questions. Ive been writing an essay as part of our contextual studies part of the course and i came across this thing called the Proteus effect, this is basically when a persons appearance in a virtual world effects the way they behave and the way they perceive themselves in the real world. This whole idea made me think of a film i really love, Ghost in the Shell. In the futuristic world of the film a cyborg, a human in completely cybernetic body, questions what it means to be human. The film also talks about the idea of a 'ghost', part of you thats really you, like your soul or maybe something completely different that can whisper to you.

For the protest project im definitely taking a feminist slant on it. I suppose my problem is that theres too many things that piss me off to think of one at the moment. Something that annoys me to no end is this whole curvy vs. skinny stuff. Yeah its a bitch that we see a select few bodies in magazines being praised as the most beautiful but we also have the same restrictive standards of what is considered 'curvy'. Basically i dont want to be super negative about the whole thing but to have a bit of humor about my protest, if such a thing is possible for a humorless feminist.