Aliasing: In an ecosystem of social media

The ALIASING exhibition reflects on how self-image and representation are constructed in social media, particularly Facebook. It looks at the processes of representing oneself and fabricating multiple personas through the use of social media; how these get scattered and transformed in the online world. It looks at social media as a self-feeding ecosystem that learns from data we provide and creates restorative and self-reassuring frameworks, also known as filter bubbles.

ALIASING is also my pseudonym. An alias is a false name used to conceal one's identity. In computing, aliasing is the use of aliases to designate files, commands; in signal processing, aliasing means misidentification, it is an effect that causes different signals to become indistinguishable (or aliases of one another) when sampled. I started using it to differentiate myself from my namesake, a sound artist, as people are often confusing us. These incidents led me to think about how representation is constructed in the networked world.

Our presence on social media is always performative, and sometimes people seem quite different in their social media behavior from how I know them in real life. While technically connecting people and shortening distances between them, social media also creates a strong separation between me and my social circles. It has happened that my Facebook friends do not recognize me in real life. I talk to them through a wall.

Two kinetic and interactive installations and one video piece reflect on these phenomena by mirroring, imitating, and simulating, and materialize the constructions of representation in social media. They make visible the learning process, the dynamic and logic of the ecosystem, which we as users are immersed in and reinforce. These three works offer the visitor different degrees of control but as a whole they bring forth a system that you can play with while being played by. Much as the ecosystem of social media itself.