It’s not YOU, it’s me

I

Imagine we are historians of the late 21st century, and we intend to write a cultural history of the Internet and refer to how people used it to build a sense of identity and the self. Let’s look at the initial period of transition from the 1990s to the 2010s, from the early days before the dotcom boom to the explosion of the commercial web and the rise of mobile devices, data extractivism, and social media supremacy. The simplest way of explaining this period would be the story of the transition from the Internet of the Avatar to the Internet of the Selfie.

The Internet of the Avatar was based on the premise that your everyday identity – your age, gender, nationality, race, and physical appearance – was irrelevant online, because on the Internet you could be whatever you desired to be. It was even expected from you, if you were a committed pioneer in this new frontier, to adopt a new name, to pick a character that could represent you and provide it with elements that would make up a new personality, a secret identity. It was not only that “on the Internet no one knows you are a dog,” as a New Yorker cartoon from the 1990s famously said, but that on the Internet, more importantly, you had to choose carefully what dog breed you pretended to be.

The Internet of the Avatar was the by-default identitarian position in early online communities, from Usenet groups and The Well, to multiplayer online games and metaverses (navigable, tridimensional online spaces). It has not completely disappeared, of course – there are traces of it in some of the most successful online communities that keep that early Web spirit alive, like Reddit or Digg, and in the parallel universe of video games. But, for most people most of the time, these are not the spaces where our online lives take place. What happened after the 1990s, starting in the mid-2000s, is broadly understood. The communitarian spirit and the no-one-cares-who-you-are-in-the-real-world ethos gave way to the age of Facebook, where you are defined by your face, and of YouTube videos, where You are the star.

Identity affirmation, commodification of your intimacy, and exploitation of the self created a whole, diversified digital economy that has branched out in multiple ways. From influencers building up their personal brands in front of massive audiences on Instagram, to YouTubers, TikTokers, and Twitch stars that have turned their everyday life into broadcasted entertainment with millions of viewers. “Surveillance capitalism,” the successful term coined by Shoshana Zuboff to explain the economic regime of our time, where every single private act can be monetized in different ways, is predicated also on a premise: we want people to know without a doubt that our real name and face is on our Instagram post – why wouldn’t we? Even if you are using an Augmented Reality filter turning you into a zombie or into Batman, it must be clear that it’s just a game and that, behind it, it is really you. After all, those people are your audience, not fake Batman’s.

II

Some of the most important features and codes of contemporary online life spontaneously rose out of the interactions between the early adopters of social media services – they were not conceived by the designers of the platforms. One famous example is the hashtag, created in the early days of Twitter by users who wanted to find a way to tag all messages related to a single topic so they could be indexed under one common label and make them searchable and findable. From Twitter, the #hashtag spread to all other social media platforms. One outcome that was less predictable is that a system that allowed to coordinate the spontaneous work of thousands of humans, sorting and indexing millions of digital objects under one single label, would be extremely useful for machines. From bots to Machine Learning systems and Machine Learning training data sets, the hashtag could now be used to automatically monitor, copy, and simulate the online behavior of social media users.

Another innovation that was not foreseen by the consumer electronics industry was the front-facing camera on mobile devices. When the initial Internet-enabled smartphones where released, they featured one single camera on the back of the device. The first cellphone model incorporating one front-facing camera, the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, was aimed at the business executives segment of the market, as these were expected to be necessary in video calls.

As smartphones very soon became, first and foremost, portable internet computers, with telephone functions becoming increasingly less relevant, the “selfie” was inevitable.

The app model, a new form of online navigation, gave total supremacy to the Internet giants that could introduce their icon on the touchscreen. Millions of users would have direct access to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter without ever having to use the browser. The practical implication of this was that, for the hundreds of millions of new users that had arrived to the Internet for the first time through smartphones, those icons on the screen represented the totality of their experience of the online world. At this point, the culture of self-affirmation by self-representation was already thriving. Mobile devices never knew the age of the Avatar, and one of the first obvious things you could do with a phone was to upload a picture of yourself.

The camera was suddenly facing the wrong way. Strange arm positions and prosthetic artefacts like selfie sticks were necessary for a while; the iPhone didn’t include a front camera until the fourth version, in 2010. Samsung, Apple, and the rest of manufacturers eventually understood that a second camera, facing the user, was as essential as the first one.

In 2020, the politics of the facial were radically altered by the impact of the COVID global crisis. The pandemic erased the face in public space, through the compulsory use of masks, and sublimated it in digital space through the imposition of Work from Home. Video teleconferencing software tools finally had their defining moment of cultural hegemony, and the grid of faces looking at the camera became one of the defining images of our time. Faces looking at cameras, cameras pointing at faces in private domestic spaces.

III

The selfie and the hashtag; the self-constructed representation of the individual versus the community of voices gathered under one common banner. These two distinguished artefacts of Internet culture are the organizing elements in Ilan Manouach’s It’s Not You, It’s Me. The project presents a collective portrait of a contemporary demos, a distributed representation of the Greek people and its identity, taken by Greeks themselves.

However, Manouach’s goal is to question what does “portrait” and what does “national identity” mean today.

The work is both site-specific and time-specific. It takes place during a summer that feels momentous for a few different reasons. It’s the second – and last, we hope – summer of the pandemic of 2020-2021, in which a society that has been physically fragmented and isolated at different degrees for many months, can finally start to plan collective actions and celebrations of togetherness in public space again. And, of course, it’s the summer of the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution of 1821, a commemoration where a certain notion of what constitutes Greekness today is celebrated.

If this is the temporal context, the spatial framing of the project takes place across two different platforms, two objects occupying both physical and digital space.

The first is a massive LED screen located at Pedio tou Areos park, a public space created in 1934 to honor the heroes of the Greek Revolution of 1821, the foundational moment of modern Greece. Throughout the park, 21 marble busts present and incorporate in the landscape the faces of 21 heroes of the Revolution. The institution of the park, a gathering space of colonial origin that has always been contemplated with a certain distance and mistrust within Greek urban culture, has been reevaluated during the months of lockdown, when safe-distance outdoor spaces suddenly acquired an importance that had not had before. Pedio tou Areos shifted from being a location that did not concern most of the neighbors to a very popular spot due to the strict sanitary measures.

The second site of the project is the #greece2021 hashtag on the Instagram platform, the most widely used image repository on the contemporary Internet, and the prime digital real state for selfies. #greece2021 is also the official hashtag used for the campaign commemorating the 200th anniversary. It is mostly used to present positive uplifting images of what Greek identity can stand for today, devoid of conflict or tension.

IV

One of the key methodologies of cultural production in the second decade of the 21st century is the creation of a dataset, a collection of digital objects that can be collectively generated, sorted, classified, and presented by the artist. In its essence, It’s Not You, It’s Me is a collection of selfies, produced by Greek citizens that have been asked through a communication campaign to take images of themselves and post them online adding the #greece2021 hashtag.

The selfie has become today a symbolic currency and a form of self-exploitation. When we upload our selfies on social media we don’t do it selflessly and innocently, since we are expecting something in return: validation, social capital, recognition, and opportunities in different forms.

But the self-portrait is also being completely reshaped today in the age of Face Recognition and Face Detection algorithms. Our faces are being constantly identified, classified, bought, and sold, as they become part of massive training datasets that are used in all kinds of applications, especially in the emerging field of Machine Learning. While many of these tasks are automated, others are not, and require the labor of precarious micro-workers, mostly from the “Global South,” who perform simple, repetitive sorting functions.

Of course, for the first time in the history of the photographic image, it’s almost impossible today to look at a picture of a face and know if that face actually corresponds to a real, existing person, or if it is a digital recreation. The “deepfake” has become a central cultural object of the current time: a video or photographic image presenting a situation, where the face of the protagonist has been replaced with someone else’s likeliness, usually with shocking or surprising intentions. With some exceptions like so-called Revenge Porn, deepfakes portray famous faces in unlikely situations. For the most part, to be deepfaked is on its own a symbol of status and privilege – only people with a public face must deal with the challenge of proving that images portraying them are real.

V

As a collective portrait made up of thousands of faces that constitute a community of subjects, It’s Not You, It’s Me reflects the complicated relationships existing today among the politics of the facial, the correlation of facial features with any notion of a national identity, the economics of surveillance capitalism and Al, and the divide between reality and simulation.

Some of the pictures in the infinite video sequence correspond to real Greek citizens that submitted them through the public call. Others are real pictures of real people –not necessarily Greek– extracted from different datasets and posted by micro-workers. Finally, others have been created artificially and do not correspond to any real person.

National celebrations, like all rituals of self-affirmation, need to be contemplated with suspicion. Problematizing what is happening inside the #greece2021 hashtag by introducing not only fake portraits but images collected by precarious digital workers surviving on the margins of the Internet economy, is a way of destabilizing triumphalist narratives of national identity.

Most selfies that we get to see exist in the scale of our mobile devices, literally held with one hand. How is our perception of them made different if we blow them up to monumental scale, as we do in the LED screen in Pedio tou Areos? How do they “speak” with the other sculptures in the park, representing the heroes of the Greek Revolution?

A big screen displaying faces in a park is only the tip of an iceberg of political, technological, and identitarian issues. Any representation of a national identity today is an impossible, failed project, a simplification of the complex set of conflicts, bonds, and interests that are bundled together in any demos.

— José Luis de Vicente