Logging Into Identity Is a web-based project that was developed within the 2nd edition of CODE; a collaborative project organized by IMPAKT together with School of Machines, Making & Make Believe (Berlin), and this year also by the two Belgium-based organizations Werktank (Leuven) and Privacy Salon/Privacytopia (Brussels/Antwerp).
Between the social media and the user, intimate stories of connection and rejection are made. This project highlights the rhetoric of a first-person perspective constructed within the interfaces in a sarcastic (but also tender) manner. This website contains scripts for monologues by anonymised famous and alternative social media services (email providers, messengers, micro blogging platforms).
These social media services use certain words to make us feel like we are taken care of by some sentient and sensuous entities. We rarely wonder who they really are. Behind the backs of code, legislation and tech giants, we easily miss the diversity in options for connections.
We relate to these services on an emotional level. They are the mediators that shape our digital identity, while in most cases, we as users shape theirs too. Our characteristics “bleed” into each other.
«Logging Into Identity», presents a symbiotic, sometimes chaotic and moving, connection between the software and the user. By logging into the identity of the social media service, we share the personal connections we construct with(in) them. Meanwhile, the scripts reveal how the values and affordances of particular social media services shape and interact with certain individuals’ identities and values. All scripts are based on a personal story and perspective of one of the team members: Anya or Nina. We are grateful for Omar to be the main designer and critical brain of this project.
Omar is a multidisciplinary artist and a knowledge enthusiast, working across video, sound, photography, design, coding, and performative instances. Their artistic practice draws its bases from a subjective point of view of their realities, where they see its manifestation moments within the complex entanglement and moments of intersection between technology, constructed environments, and human cognition.
omaradel.comSwaeny Nina Kersaan is an artist and researcher whose practice involves creative consultancy of digital culture, surveillance technologies, avatar creation and other modes of online self-representation. With participatory projects, performance, essays and digital artworks, Swaeny Nina demonstrates that contending increasingly powerful computed control is critical in ensuring agency over our (digital) identities. After studying graphic design in Rotterdam, Swaeny Nina graduated from ArtEZ University of the Arts and obtained her Masters of Art and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster.
swaenynina.comAnya is a researcher of digital technologies as a part of culture.
She has received her education in the Higher School of Economics (BA in Cultural Studies) and University of Maastricht (MSc in Cultures of Art, Science and Technology). Anya is doing research both within and outside of academia, exploring interdisciplinarity and artistic research as a way to ask oneself, what does it mean, to have knowledge of digital technologies.