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Assignment 1: Critical Making exercise—The beautiful mistakes of a selfie. Video.
- WE MADE A MANUAL
For the first Digital Craft’s assignment we were asked to tackle a small card game with the idea that we picked three different pieces to frame a creation challenge. Alongside Fanny, Floor, Roos and Lianne, we decided that the cards that together made the assignment interesting for us were:
Call to action card: Highlight the beautiful errors and mistakes in ____ Technology or System card: Selfies And finally, Card 3: Make a video!
This was specially interesting for me because through my photo and video work I am constantly investigating how the use of our devices, in this case translated to the selfie, influences our daily behavior and the way we relate to one another.
I also love to record people performing this when they don’t realize it, and found myself doing this throughout the process.
And so we began. We created this fun manual to guide anyone who doesn’t know our project through every step of what we did. [link here] Like our product, our manual plays with irony and sarcasm. This was the best way we found we could transmit our skepticism on the technology itself.
If I think about a selfie, the beautiful errors in it are pretty simple. We are constantly looking to put ourselves out there (by sharing the product or image on our social media sites). However, by doing so, we are confining our present reality to this egoistic action. We are putting ourselves in a bubble, our own personal world until we get it right. This is exactly what we HIGHLIGHTED through our prototype.
With The Selfie Booth, we position the person taking the image inside a box…literally.
By applying the semi-transparent fabric, which initially was 100% subject to improvisation, we created a direct translation from the digital filters we have available nowadays in per say Instagram. The result? A hybrid between the digital and the analogue in one accessory. By creating this “natural filter”we are sarcastically pointing our fingers to the collective desire to enhance the way people see or perceive us.
Finally we highlight the irony of self-portraiture by making the selfie fully practical, almost automatic through our product’s size. With our booth, you do not have to find the best frame any longer. By using our product you already have a predetermined closeup that excludes everything from the background but yourself.
Are we actually sharing our experience? Or are we focused on promoting ourselves? Isn’t this an unconscious form of digital isolation?
In retrospective, this project has only continued to prove me that a selfie, like many other digital-caused behavioral phenomenons, is an urgent call for social connection, and that sometimes, only by making its contradictory effects visible and physical—even fashionable—(or by highlighting its mistakes), we can create products that show people that sometimes, the moment can be more important than the photo.
I hope our rudimentary “Selfie Booth” inspired you as much as it inspired me.
