Abstract
Amalia Ulman’s “Excellences and Perfections” has been called the first great social media artwork by curators at the Tate Modern. The work consists of a 6-month hoax based on Instagram in which the already successful Ulman tricks her friends and followers into believing a fully-scripted life catastrophe. Ulman’s work has a great deal to tell us about the nature of aesthetics on contemporary social media and how machine learning-based tools have now automated her Cindy Sherman-like consolidation of popular aesthetics. Taking us through the “whore”, the “it girl” and the “reformed whore” (in her own words) Ulman shows us that simply “looking” true is often enough.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
New Media, Technology and the Arts
KEYWORDS
Social media, Automation, AI, Machine learning, Aesthetics, New media, Interpretation
