Social media, reality television, and the contemporary performance of self

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Content SOCIAL MEDIA, REALITY TELEVISION, AND THE CONTEMPORARY
PERFORMANCE OF SELF
by
Casey Kauffmann
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements of the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS (FINE ARTS)
May 2020
Copyright 2020 Casey Kauffmann
0

Acknowledgements

Jennifer West
Amelia Jones
Edgar Arceneaux
Jessica Kauffmann
Dulce Soledad Ibarra
Johnny Forever
Paulson Lee
Paul Donald
Andy Campbell
Nao Bustamante
Mary Kelly
Juan Morales
ii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………………......ii
List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………………....iv
Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………....…...v
I. The Contemporary Performance of Self ………………………………………………...……...1
II. Structures of Feeling and the Holistic Analysis of the Contemporary
Performance of Self .………………………………………………………………………….2
III. 1970s Video Art: Embodiment and the Technological Substrate …………………………….5
IV. The Rise of Reality Television and Social Media: A Symbiotic
Relationship ..………………………………………………………………………………..11
V. Artistic Agency and Corporate Platforms: The Empowering and
Disempowering Effects of Social Media and Reality Television .…………………………..16
VI. Femme Representation within Reality Television and the Art
Historical Precedent ...……………………………………………………………………….24
VII. Decontextualization and the Infinite Free Exchange of Poor Images
Through Social Media Networks ……….……………………………….………………….31
VIII. The Myth of Authenticity ..………………………………………………………………..37
Figures ...………………………………………………………………………………………...40
Bibliography ……………...………………………………………………………………….….45


iii

List of Figures

Figure Page

1. Boomerang, Richard Serra, 1974, single-channel video,
color, with sound, 10 min . ...………………………………………………………....………… 6
2. Now! , Lynda Benglis, 1973, single-channel digital video,
transferred from video tape, color, sound, 12 min. ..….………………………....…………... 8
3. On Screen, Lynda Benglis, 1972, single-channel video,
color, with sound, 7 min. .………………….…………….……..………………….……….…..8
4. Command Performance , Vito Acconci, video installation,
mixed media video installation with sound, 56 min. 40 sec. ....……………………….……. 9
5. Kitty IV Collage , Casey Kauffmann, 2014, iPhone collage,
640 x 640 pixels. …………………………………………………………………………..…..17
6. #attentionseeker, Casey Kauffmann, 2015, iPhone collage,
640 x 640 pixels . ………………………………………………………………………...…….. 18
7. Knowing Others and Wanting to be Known , Casey Kauffmann,
2020, video still, single channel video collage, color, sound, 18 min 30 sec. …….…..…. 24
8. Knowing Others and Wanting to be Known: Who Do You Think
You Are I Am , Casey Kauffmann, 2020, video still single channel
video collage, color, sound, 18 min 30 sec. ………....………………………………………25
9. Knowing Others and Wanting to be Known: Who Do You Think
You Are I Am , Casey Kauffmann, 2020, video still single channel
video collage, color, sound, 18 min 30 sec. ………....………………………………………25


iv

Abstract

This text is an analysis of the influence of social media and reality television on the
contemporary performance of self. With consideration to artistic practice this research accounts
for the technological advancements of the past fifty years and the co-evolution of these cultural
phenomena.
v

I. The Contemporary Performance of Self

Technological advance today has not led us to feeding the hungry, curing disease, or
sheltering humanity; it has led us to sharing cat videos and selfies. There is perhaps no industry
more dominant today than the online architectures built in support of the digital transmission and
archive of selfhood. From politics to artistic practice, this overwhelming desire to know others
and to be known colors every aspect of our lives. Art is no stranger to expressions of identity,
and physical embodiment. The drive for artists to convey their own subjectivities has a long and
intricate historical precedent. The history of the performance of self, within artistic practice and
culture at large, is inexorably tied to technological developments. The purpose of this paper is to
investigate how social media and reality television has produced, influenced, and documented
the present condition of selfhood within artistic practice. Using Raymond Williams’s concept of
structures feeling as an analytical framework, I will provide a critical inquiry into my own work
and the work of other artists who directly address the influence of social media and reality
television on how we perform, transmit, and enact our conceptions of ourselves. The mirror-like
relationship among maker, monitor, and camera present in video art from the seventies illustrates
the influence of new technologies over artistic practice. The relationship of artists working today
through new photographic substrates is comparable to artists creating video works during that
time. Artists today inhabit a somewhat different relationship to technology as it is often tied to
iPhones and the internet. These innovations provide tools which go far beyond the simple act of
documentation. All works created through these highly politicized channels are unavoidably
mitigated by corporate ownership, ever-increasing surveillance, censorship, and algorithmic bias.
Web 2.0 arrived in the early 2000’s, the same time that reality television reached its height in
1

popularity. One could argue that the potential for individual agency set forth by the premise of
1
reality television produced social media. Often disregarded as being frivolous and
inconsequential in academic receptions, both reality television and social media have changed
how we see and enact our selfhood, within artistic practice and otherwise.

II. Structures of Feeling and the Holistic Analysis of the Contemporary Performance of
Self

I am an artist and consumer who delights in the reuse and critical analysis of the
discarded signifiers of visual culture. I see the undeniable impact of what is generally considered
base and low, superficial and empty. Feminine coded signifiers in mass culture of the
aesthetically pink and sparkly variety, which rely on mechanisms of validation seeking produced
by the internalization of gender coding, often enjoy this low rank in hierarchical structures of
analysis. The continual response of underestimation and rejection within academic contexts only
results in my own masochistic delight as I watch their continual rise and dominance as staples of
how we view and project our own existence, while acknowledging their both empowering and
disempowering effects on our shared experience. In my own analysis of the cultural impacts of
these generally disregarded themes and practices, I require a framework which recognizes the
contributions of all elements to the vast unknowable whole of this thing we call culture, and
Raymond Williams, one of the founders of cultural studies, provides the perfect model. In
Williams’s book The Long Revolution , published in 1961, he introduces the concept of structures
1
Web 2.0 is described in the Encyclopedia Britannica as, “ Web 2.0, term devised to differentiate the post-dotcom
bubble World Wide Web with its emphasis on social networking , content generated by users, and cloud computing
from that which came before. The 2.0 appellation is used in analogy with common computer software naming
conventions to indicate a new, improved version. The term had its origin in the name given to a series of Web
conferences, first organized by publisher Tim O’Reilly in 2004.” Hosch, William L. “Web 2.0.” Encyclopædia
Britannica , Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 14 Sept. 2018, www.britannica.com/topic/Web-20.

2

of feeling in his seminal essay, “The Analysis of Culture.” In contrast to the approach of many
preceding cultural theorists, he presents a process which frames culture as needing to be
understood holistically. Many theorists present a course for analysis following hierarchical
structures, framing the concept of culture as only accessible to particular elite classes. Williams
seeks to collapse hierarchical structures as a means for inquiry by developing a theory of culture
based on the relationship of its elements in a whole way of life. Williams approach illustrates the
essential nature in going beyond historical modes of critique in the analysis of culture and into
the social culture and felt experience associated with a moment, “the analysis of culture, from
such a definition is the clarification of meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular
way of life, a particular culture.’ The organization of production, the structure of the family, the
structure of institutions which express are governed social relationships, the characteristic forms
through which members of the society communicate.” His concept of a structure of feeling
2
allows us to understand how a particular element or practice is tied to all of the elements of
culture being produced in that moment, and all practices and processes preceding it. One element
cannot and does not exist without the others.
Williams defines a structure of feeling as, “the particular living result of all the elements
in the general organization.” Williams goes on to acknowledge that the artistic production of a
3
particular period and place will inevitably incorporate these living results, often unconsciously.
In fact, our only frame of reference, a hint or clue at the mechanics of a structure of feeling
residing in the past, is the recorded culture (this includes all artifacts produced within a particular
period from art objects to intangible social values such as moralistic views or causes) it leaves
4
2
Raymond Williams. “The Analysis of C ulture,” The Long Revolution , (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 42.
3
Ibid., 48.
4
Ibid., 49.

3

behind. Recorded culture falls into Williams cultural category of documentary culture defined as,
“the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and
experiences are variously recorded.” The participating individuals engaged in the living
5
production of a structure of feeling will be unaware of its production as they are in the process of
creating it. “One generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social
character or the general cultural pattern, but the new generation will have its own structure of
feeling, which will not appear to have come ‘from’ anywhere.” Understanding the unknowable
6
nature of our own structure of feeling supports the need for the critical consideration of social
media and reality television as documentary culture which will later reveal how the
contemporary performance of self is being produced today.
In the spirit of Williams’s holistic analysis of culture through the framework of structures
of feeling I would be remiss to not elaborate upon my own background and relationship to the
development of reality television and social media. I was born in the San Fernando Valley, a
suburb of Los Angeles California, in 1989 the same year the internet was invented. My father
worked for Mattel for thirty years making Barbie commercials. Only after spending his
adolescence engaged with radical progressive movements including the Students for a
Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, and marching with Martin Luther King on
Washington. My mother also grew up in the Valley. She was a pageant queen and model,
winning the title of Queen of Queen’s in the Hollywood parade. These aspects of my upbringing
would be enough to spark my interest in the representation of women, which is only deepened by
growing up in a family of all women. I have three highly vocal, intelligent, and arguably
5
Ibid., 41.
6
Ibid., 49.

4

heteronormative presenting sisters. I reached adolescence in the early 2000’s coinciding with the
proliferation of social networking sites and the height of reality television’s popularity. The
internet went public in 1993 and I grew up alongside it in a city which is often considered the
most dominating site for Western cultural production today. I became acutely aware of the
significance of Los Angeles in this regard, particularly in connection to the representation of
women, after spending five years in Olympia Washington pursuing my undergraduate degree at
Evergreen State College. This literal and critical distance was the catalyst to my understanding
that all parts relate to the whole in the amalgamation of projected and internalized selfhood and
identity. Before I expand upon the performance of self in contemporary art practices, of both
myself and others, it is necessary for me to elaborate on preceding artistic practices engaged with
these subjects particularly as they relate to technological developments within their time.

III. 1970’s Video Art: Embodiment and the Technological Substrate
The 1970’s is often considered the most influential period of the artistic practice of video
art. Its relevance is echoed today within net art practice due to its irrefutable connection to
technological advancements of the period and the resulting connection to agency and
embodiment. The work produced during this period exists because of, and is channeled through,
the relationship among camera, monitor, and maker. These apparatuses often serve as both a
mirror and recording device for the subject and maker (which is one and the same within many
of these works). The rapid proliferation of work during this period which enacts this relationship
can be attributed to the development of user-friendly technologies which became available to
artists during this time. In the late 1960’s many artists were introduced to the hand-held video

5

camera and thus a completely new medium for the projection of their own corporeal bodies
through the substrate of the monitor. The video art of the 1970’s provides my holistic analysis of
7
contemporary self-representation with fascinating conceptual parallels, yielding similarities to
today which are worth exploring. To understand the contemporary performance of self and how
it relates to technological advance it is useful to understand our direct past, even in its
fragmented and historicized record as stated by Raymond Williams, “it is true that when fifty
years have passed it is likely that reasonably permanent valuations will have been arrived at,
though these may continue to fluctuate.” By comparing the work created then and now and its
8
relationship to the accessible consumer technologies of their era’s, we can recognize the changes
and connections within the trajectory of self embodiment in both art and popular culture. It
becomes clear that the way we see and perform ourselves is dependent on the available apparatus
of transmission. Though the advancements in these technologies feel rapid today, there are
measurable comparisons in the recognizable motivating social patterns of the past and present
9
which govern our self embodiment.
Richard Serra’s video work, Boomerang created in 1974, exemplifies the mirror dynamic
of the projection and feedback loop. Nancy Holt eloquently performs the role of both subject and
transmission device in the piece. She is situated in the center of the screen with a set of
headphones. (Fig.1) Her voice is recorded and then played through the headphones as she
7
Amelia Jones. “Cinematic Self Imaging and the New Televisual Body,” In Self/ Image: Technology, Representation
and the Contemporary Subject , (New York & London: Routledge Press, 2006), 135.
8
Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” 51 .
9
Williams elaborates on the significance of the discovery and analysis of a particular social pattern, “The 'pattern of
culture' is a selection and configuration of interests and activities, and a particular valuation of them, producing a
distinct organization, a 'way of life'. Yet even these, as we recover them, are usually abstract. Possibly, however, we
can gain the sense of a further common element, which is neither the character nor the pattern, but as it were the
actual experience through which these were lived.” Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” 47 .

6

describes her experience of the delayed transmission of her own voice. Holt’s mesmerizing
narration includes statements such as, “I am surrounded by me and my mind surrounds me…
there is no escape.” In Rosalind Krauss’s influential 1976 essay “Video: The Aesthetics of
10
Narcissism” she characterizes video art as documenting “the prison of the collapsed present.”
11
Krauss goes on to say, “what Holt is describing in Boomerang is a situation in which the action
of the mirror-reflection (which is auditory in this case) severs her from a sense of text: from the
prior words she has spoken; from the way language connects her both to her own past and to a
world of objects. What she comes to is a space where, as she says, ‘I am surrounded by me’.”
12
The concept of a collapsed present and the self-encapsulation of a subject and makers
embodiment as a prison rings true today in the contemporary performance of self as it relates to
social media. We exist in a unique social context in which the record and repetition of the
transmission of ourselves through the social media landscape is a part of everyday life. We
experience an obliteration of the linear present. As we record and transmit ourselves,
instantaneously indexing each moment within our timelines, we situate the present in a curated
record of the past which may be experienced all at once by ourselves and the public alike. The
transmission of selfhood through social media places us in a similar position as Holt in
Boomerang. The statement, “I am surrounded by me” not only indicates a state of collapsed
present, it also points to a narcissistic mode of self representation facilitated by the technology
used. This state of self gratification at the repetitive broadcast and experience of our own image
is both the result and impetus for the development of social networking sites. We inhabit the role
10
Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (1976): 52.
11
Ibid., 53.
12
Ibid., 53.

7

of both the subject and transmission device as our phones record, living in an echo chamber of
our own creation and image.
There are two video works from Lynda Benglis which similarly disintegrate the viewers
conception of linear time. One achieves this effect through her use of language and the other
through her own presence and disappearance. Both videos employ the device of material
confusion using the relationships among camera, monitor, and body. Now, created in 1974,
shows a close up of Benglis’s head on a separate monitor, which serves as a virtual backdrop to
her physical head performing the same actions previously recorded. The image of herself on
screen is flipped and faces her, creating an erotic tension between her physical body and
reflection flattened within the same plane of the video screen. (Fig.2) She and the reflection
exclaim, “Now!” or asks, “Is it Now?” Her word choice of, the either command or question, of
13
“now” refers to the viewers uncertainty of the temporal organization and source of Benglis’s
voice. Are we hearing and seeing the “real” Benglis, or the previously recorded one? Similarly to
Serra’s Boomerang this video achieves a state of a collapsed present. The repetition of Benglis’s
both physical and virtual embodiment is also present in her 1972 work, On Screen. The video
begins with static on a monitor and then shows a close up of Benglis making faces towards the
camera/ viewer. Benglis then places her physical body in front of the camera, repeating the same
actions and movements enacted on the screen behind her. (Fig.3) The seven minute video
displays the repetition of these movements and actions, furthering the viewers continual
confusion as both the ‘real’ and the virtual Benglis shift their positions. Amelia Jones explains
describes the work in her book Self/ Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary
13
Ibid., 55.

8

Subject : “Nothing is simple and there is no clearly differentiated ‘real’ from which the image of
Benglis emerges to imply a pre-representational state of full, knowable (or knowing)
embodiment.” In the worlds created by Benglis in both videos seeing is not believing. The
14
viewer’s conventional trust in the on-screen relationship between subject and object is destroyed
through Benglis’s deft use of material confusion, and the ambiguity presented between her
screen, her body, and our screen. Our relationship to embodiment within social media and reality
television also employs a relationship to the body in which seeing is not believing. There is a
suspension of disbelief used within both practices for the viewer, user, and public. Consumers of
these mediums engage with an implicit awareness that though the curated and edited versions of
the subject’s virtual embodiment are presented as real, they are in fact not. It is the implied state
of the agency of the subject which sparks interest. Its conveyance through a temporal
organization which exists in a state of a collapsed present inherently points to the impossibility
of the documentation of reality. These projections of life in reality television take their form in
highly edited and filtered conflicts, confessionals, reunion episodes, selfies, posts, and tweets
which we all accept and know do not reflect the user/ actor; yet their inherent purpose is to
signify a state of authenticity.
Vito Acconci’s 1974 video piece Command Performance seeks to test the limits of the
observed and enacted subject. The setup includes seats for two viewers, one of whom receives,
what can only be described as perversely disturbing directions from Acconci lying on a bed as
displayed on a monitor. (Fig. 4) The other viewer sits behind watching a screen displaying the
first viewer under a spotlight who receives these nauseating commands from the monitor
14
Jones, “Cinematic Self Imaging and the New Televisual Body,” 136.

9

displaying Acconci. This piece is made possible by the technology of the era, allowing for the
instant feedback display of the physical embodiment and actions of the viewer/ performer. This
arrangement shatters the power dynamic of the observant viewer’s dominance over the recorded
performer. Amelia Jones writes about the body of the viewer as, “ both a seen body and a seeing
flesh. She becomes flesh of the world (of the second video monitor) even as she establishes
herself as a viewing subject.” Rather than Acconci suffering the fate of the embodied on-screen
15
other his, commands, documentation, and live transmission of the viewer create a complex
unfamiliar othering. This piece collapses the temporal organization of the performed and the
displayed into the present with the assistance of the monitor, camera, and live feedback. The
agency of the subject and viewer is similarly is called into question through contemporary self
embodiment in reality television and social media. Both genres offer the subject a complicated
position of agency to enact their conception of selfhood through the filtration of corporate
architectures. Their performance is both enhanced and undercut by the implicit viewership of
their instantaneous transmission. Command Performance yields powerful questions about the
agency of viewer/ performer which are echoed within the complicated place of the observed
subject in both reality tv and social media.
To understand the work and cultural material produced today which enacts a performance
of self it is useful to analyze the work created within the period of the seventies. All of the works
I’ve presented complicate our conceptions of subjectivity and the present. They do this through
tactics of material confusion and newfound relationships between maker and image all made
possible through access to new technologies. These complex relationships are echoed today in
15
Ibid., 153.

10

the questions posed by interdisciplinary new genre and net artists engaged with the rapid
developments of technologies we are currently experiencing. Social media and reality television
are similarly accessible and have changed the way we document, transmit, and enact ourselves in
this moment and in the foreseeable future.

IV. The Rise of Reality Television and Social Media: A Symbiotic Relationship

Since its invention cable television has reflected our longstanding fascination with the
blurred lines between the public and private. But what might be considered the first example of
reality television stretches all the way back to I Love Lucy which premiered in 1951. The success
of the show was predicated on public interest garnered through effective publicity campaigns,
connecting the on-screen lives of Lucy and Ricky to its starring cast members Desi Arnaz and
Lucille Ball who played themselves on the show. Since this early example of our interest in the
16
blurred line between the public and private subject, viewers and users have become increasingly
more sophisticated. The appeal for dedicated reality television viewers and social media fanatics
like myself has less to do with locating the authentic reflection of what is real, and more to do
with the self-aware performativity which lies in-between. Reality television predates social
media but on the whole they have grown in popularity together within my own lifetime giving
me particular insight into the social outcomes of these phenomena. Williams states in relation to
literary analysis, “but everyone living in the period would have had something which, I have
argued, no later individual can wholly recover: that sense of the life within which the novels
16
Lori Landay, “Reality” and the Founding Discourses of Television Or, Why We Love Lucy ,” Transition 3:
Television in Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) 1.

11

were written, and which we now approach through our selection.” Their growth has been
17
dependent upon technological advances and their simultaneous normalization of the surveillance
culture we find ourselves in today.
Because so many television programs play with this ever-popular concept of the real,
finding a broad enough definition to encompass all the shows which might be classified as reality
television is a surprisingly difficult task. In Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, Laurie
Ouellette and Susan Murray define reality television as, “an unabashedly commercial genre
united less by a set of rules or certainties than by the fusion of popular entertainment with a
self-conscious claim to the discourse of the real.” This feels incredibly broad but how else
18
could one describe a genre which includes game documentaries, dating programs, makeover
programs, docusoaps, talent contests, court programs, reality sitcoms, celebrity situational
programs, charity programs, reality investigations, and even the formula of reality tv itself,
which some shows satirize while benefiting from its undeniable popularity and voyeuristic
tendencies. One of the first shows which catalyzed the genre was An American Family, which
aired in 1973 on PBS and was a precursor to MTV’s 1991 show The Real World. Both shows
19
documented the lives of non actors living under one roof but a significant delineation beyond the
aspect of family was the use of new technologies in the The Real World.
17
To demonstrate this concept of the specificity of a particular period Williams uses experts on nineteenth-century
literature as an example of the impossibility of a complete understanding of a particular era, “One can say with
confidence, for example, that nobody really knows the nineteenth-century novel; nobody has read, or could have
read, all its examples, over the whole range from printed volumes to penny serials.” Williams, “The Analysis of
Culture,” 50 .
18
Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray, “Introduction.” Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: NYU
Press, 2009), 3 .
19
Gray, Tim. “Before 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians,' There Was PBS' 'An American Family'.” Variety , 12 Jan.
2018, https://variety.com/2018/vintage/features/reality-tv-an-american-family-1202660360/.

12

Prior to The Real World shows in the late 1980’s such as Cops and America’s Funniest
Home Videos were made possible by the widespread availability of handheld video cameras.
Capturing the intimate moments made available through The Real World and Big Brother
depends on the use of small microphones and a plethora of compact and hidden cameras. The
distribution of drama on many reality shows take form outside of the television on the internet
through SMS updates, social media documentation of conflicts amongst cast members, and live
24-hour webcam footage displayed on some shows websites. Perhaps the earliest and most
popular example of audience interactivity through new technologies is American Idol which
premiered in 2002. The winner of the singing competition was decided by viewers votes through
a SMS text-your-vote system. The conceptual benefit of this system is twofold for viewers as it
is both an indication of viewer/ user influence over results while simultaneously upholding a real
time connection to the quantifiable real world results. On reality television’s relationship to
technology and viewership Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray state, “reality tv, as we predicted,
has also remained on the cusp of developments in media convergence, interactivity,
user-generated content, and greater viewer involvement in television. The Internet and mobile
phones have become much more integral to the marketing, promotion, “mass customization,”
and delivery of all broadcast and cable television.” The ways in which the development of
20
reality television has run parallel with new technologies is undeniable as does the development
of social media. I would also argue that the acceptance of surveillance culture set forth by social
media enjoys a symbiotic relationship to reality television, both normalizing the blur of our
public and private lives and existing as a result of it.
20
Ouellette and Murray, “Introduction,” 2 .

13

In Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture Mark Andrejevic elaborates on how
voyeurism took hold of the television industry in the early 2000’s. He connects this sudden
affirmation of surveillance as a form of entertainment to the events and political climate
following 9/11. Politicians were encouraging private citizens to use their phones to record and
report suspicious behaviors in their communities with a “see something say something” ethos.
Andrejevic uses shows such as MTV’s Room Raiders , where potential daters use fancy tech to
complete CSI style searches of the rooms of their unsuspecting matches after kidnapping them in
a van, as an example of the enjoyable and supposedly revealing quality of the exposure of our
private lives. He states, “this is a pleasure that is becoming increasingly available, thanks to
what might be described (misleadingly) as the democratization of surveillance in the interactive
era. Thanks to the widespread distribution of increasingly sophisticated digital devices, it is
becoming easier for us to spy on one another to capture, record, or stumble across behind the
scenes glimpses and information.” In regards to the contributions of social media and
21
smartphones to this era of interest in the exposure of private life he goes on to say, “the internet
and other new media technologies at our disposal increase the potential for deceit (on the internet
we can be whoever we say we are, at least for a while, and cell phones make it possible to
disguise our locations at, at least for now) using apps for new forms of monitoring one another.”
The entertainment and supposed educational value of the exposure of our private lives was
22
instantiated by reality television and normalized through social media. They proliferated together
in a political climate of suspicion and private citizen policing in a post 9/11 era with surveillance
technologies more available than ever before. This era of increased surveillance technology and
21
Mark Andrejevic, “Visceral Literacy: Reality TV, Savvy Viewers, and Auto-Spies,” Reality TV: Remaking
Television Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 322 .
22
Ibid., 323.

14

cultural climate combined with the popularity of reality television primed the world for the
acceptance of the data-mining we willingly subject ourselves to through the hidden architectures
of social media.
The development of social media within the last ten years is almost too rapid to account
for. The era prior to Web 2.0 characterized as the world wide web was set forth on a utopic
ideology of the democratization of content and contribution which is continually chipped away at
due to ever-tightening corporate control. Social media is the mark of the development of Web
2.0 in 2002, it is characterized by a change from static web pages to dynamic or user-generated
content. A brief timeline of the development of Web 2.0 characteristic websites include
Wikipedia (2001); Friendster (2002); Blogger (2003); Myspace (2003); Facebook (2004); Flickr
(2004); Reddit (2005); Youtube (2005); iPhone (2007); Twitter (2007); Grinder (2009);
Instagram (2010); and the list continues to grow from Vine to Tik Tok and so on. Each
development points to the increasing speed, efficiency, and decontextualization with which
information and image are exchanged. In the introduction to Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in
the Twenty- First Century Ed Halter and Lauren Cornell state,
These inventions have radically changed popular culture and our personal lives,
moving us out of the broadcast television era and into a more democratized media
condition. Each, however, has risen so rapidly it's unclear how these platforms
have affected our interactions with one another, what kinds of materials we
choose to share, and how we imagine ourselves.”
23

Our interactions with social media have moved from the computer to our phones, which
has had a profound effect on the content which is produced by these platforms and forms
of dissemination.
23
Lauren Cornell, “Hard Reboot: An Introduction to Mass Effect.” Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-
First Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015) xx.

15

The recent tightening of parental controls on the platform Tumblr serves as an
excellent example of how the corporate filter of iPhone’s has had an effect on the content
produced through these platforms. Unlike the unmitigated relationship of the maker to the
neutral camera and monitor of 1970’s video art, every piece of content which passes
through an iPhone is subject to the corporate surveillance and community app store
standards set by Apple. Our data or the transmission of our own embodiment is the
product available for corporate use and analyzation through these apps. This continuation
of surveillance culture popularized in the post-9/11 era through reality television leads to
the continual homogenization of content and erasure of marginalized communities
through practices of censorship and timeline organization based in social currency.
Tumblr for years has served as a democratized resource for sexual exploration and
representation for many marginalized communities including sex workers and LGBTQ
youth. In December of 2018 Tumblr set new guidelines eradicating so-called
“pornographic material” from its site in response to the app’s removal from the Apple
app store months prior. This indicates how the platform guidelines are beholden to the
standards set forth by Apple, destroying Tumblr’s initial ethos of free image exchange.
The result of this, for Tumblr and all other applications which are beholden to these
standards, is the production of homogenized content subject to the dominant regulations
of a single corporation. Since much of our contemporary self-imaging practices occur
through these platforms it is clear how the corporate filter endangers any democratizing
potential conveyed at the outset of their invention.

16

V. Artistic Agency and Corporate Platforms: The Empowering and Disempowering
Effects of Social Media and Reality Television
Reality television and (even more so) social media at their outset, like most new
technologies and cultural elements, arrive on our screens with utopic promise and potential.
Reality television promises the agency of the performer, it inherently connects itself to lofty
notions of authenticity. The performer is not an actor but often referred to as “a regular person
like you or me,” widening the field of representation beyond paid, polished, and boring
professionals. Social media promises a similar democratizing potential and newfound agency for
the performer/ user. Comprised of the unmitigated public, social media offers anyone with access
to the internet the unprecedented opportunity to author their own story while engaging with
global communities. As Williams’ concept of structures of feeling states, we cannot see the
effect, trajectory, and influence of a particular cultural moment while we participate in its
creation. As these two elements continually unfold before us they elucidate questions of gender
stereotypes, agency, and embodiment which are transmitted through corporate filters. The
following is an analysis of the work of artists, including myself, who engage with the structures
of reality television and social media to illuminate their both empowering and disempowering
effects for the transmission of selfhood through these corporate platforms.
Though I recognize and acknowledge the powerfully disempowering effects of the
corporate landscape of Instagram and all other social media platforms, it is difficult for me to
ignore the democratizing potential for the visibility of marginalized users due to my own
experience with it. In 2014, after undergrad before I ever considered internet art as a viable
practice, I ended up in the hospital with strep throat. I wanted sympathy without being too

17

obnoxious, so I made my very first phone collage, an image of the iv in my arm with cute kittens
and sparkles.(Fig. 5) I had a realization that changed the trajectory of my work forever: I could
use humor and the emotional distance of social media to talk about difficult or dark things. I
started an Instagram account called @uncannysfvalley, where I upload collages comprised of
found images I make using only my iPhone. The collages themselves have significant technical
implications which I will later address, but the social implications of their life on Instagram are
equally significant. In 2014 I became acquainted with a small group of LA artists. I was going to
openings with them, an outsider looking in, still living with my folks in the Valley. They all had
MFA’s and social ties to these communities, I wanted in, but I sought to circumvent the rigorous
social networking requirements of openings, afterparties, and endless schmoozing. I started
@uncannysfvalley to introduce these LA art communities to my work and perspective, while
skipping the rigorous attendance requirements of gallery hopping. The title uncannysfvalley is
both a referent to my LA home, the San Fernando Valley, and the term in aesthetics, uncanny
valley. The term refers to a measure of human discomfort with animatronic representations of
human behavior. I wanted to create a discomfort and fascination with the digital manifestation of
my darkest feelings through the lense of humor. I was interested in what I saw as an academic/
art world rejection of what is often considered gratuitous or superficial digital expressions of
validation and attention seeking which occurs on social networking sites. Though I saw the same
desperation for visibility and validation in the LA art world laid before me. (Fig. 6) This parallels
the collapse of hierarchies of high and low culture present in all of my work. My scheme
succeeded. I slowly grew a following, inside and outside of artistic communities. Many of my
followers included female Tumblr teens who, still to this day, direct message me to tell me how

18

my work within the authorship of femme narratives using found materials makes them feel seen.
The art world noticed too. I started being included in underground group shows, then solo shows
in artist run spaces, and eventually gained acceptance into the MFA program at the University of
Southern California, not because of long treaded paths of nepotism, but because of my online
visibility and Instagram account.
However, this sense of empowerment is balanced by the disempowerment of the
ever-changing corporate structure of Instagram. My work is often censored and deleted, due to
oppressively stringent decency standards set forth by the app. This points to the fact that, as a
user’s visibility grows, so does the monitoring of their content, illustrating both empowering and
disempowering effects for women using Instagram as an architecture of self representation. I live
in constant fear of the deletion of my massive account, or the ubiquitous punishment of the
shadowban. The elusive algorithmic changes to the structure of the timeline also affect my
24
sense of agency. Instagram, like Tumblr, used to have a time-based order of user timelines. Your
visibility to followers was based on simply when you posted. Now, timelines are ordered by the
accumulation of likes and follows, destroying the apps’ initial democratizing potential, favoring
those users who already hold high levels of both social and monetary currency. I still love my
Instagram, however, and recognize its instrumentality to my career and trajectory. It has
provided me with a social architecture I have used to build myself up, circumventing the usual
classist and sexist paths towards visibility as a maker, despite its many flaws.
25
24
The Urban Dictionary defines shadowban as, “ Banning a user from a web forum in such a way that the banned
user is unaware of the ban. Usually takes the form of showing that user's posts/profile/etc. only to that user; other
users never see them. Considered underhanded chicken-shit behavior.” “Shadowban.” Urban Dictionary ,
www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shadowban.
25
The path toward visibility as a maker is usually dependent upon who you know, which is a clearly classist avenue
to success. This is compounded with the lack of representation for unabashedly femme coded signifiers within
artistic practice. Instagram has worked for me as a tool for gaining access and acceptance within artistic and

19

Artists working within the arena’s of both reality television and social media exploit an
accessibility to mass audiences not often utilized by contemporary artists. The premise of the
short-lived Bravo reality series The Work of Art: The Next Great American Artist was comically
set for failure, the perfect environment for the work of performance artist Nao Bustamante. She
appeared as a contestant on the show commenting in a 2010 for Frieze magazine, “as a kind of
‘social sculpture’,” exploring what happens when an artist like her ‘penetrates the television
bubble’.” Her success in undercutting the impossibility of a holistic creative process to serve a
26
competitive framework at an episodic pace is highlighted in her losses on the show. She almost
gets eliminated in the first episode, which asks the contestants to create portraits of one another.
Refusing the representational approach adopted by all of her fellow cast members, she replies to
the critics indignation at her supposedly thoughtless creation with the statement, “ I am not
responsible for your experience of my work.” This statement that was perhaps lost on Bravo
27
audiences, but graces t-shirts available on her website to this day. The episode that eventually got
Bustamante eliminated is a challenge which serendipitously suits her practice and the essence of
her entire performance on the show. The contestants are asked to create a piece of “shock” art
and in the studio, contestants, judges, and Bustamante herself cannot explain what she is making.
In her confessional interview, Nao states: “For me, the art is a kind of discovery process.” The
28
viewer is given the impression of failure but her statement and the execution of the work reveals
that everything is going as planned, the plan being improvisational malleable to the
academic communities, justifying the power and relatability of the pink sparkly worlds I create through the
accumulation of likes and follows.
26
Jennifer Doyle interview with Nao Bustamante,“Guest Stars,” Frieze (22 July 2010), available online at:
https://frieze.com/article/guest-stars; October 22, 2019.
27
“Self-Reflexive,” The Work of Art: The Next Great American Artist , season 1, episode 1, Bravo, 9 June 2010.
28
“A Shock To The System,” The Work of Art: The Next Great American Artist , season 1, episode 4, Bravo, 30 July
2010.

20

circumstance. During their gallery exhibition Nao sits in a woven cardboard hut supported by a
teepee, herself and the structure covered in trash art as she caresses a perceivably scatalogical
paint-stained flower on her lap or crotch area. Judge Jerry Saltz, echoing the sentiments of his
fellow judges, criticizes the work stating that because Nao could not sufficiently describe what
the piece “is,” she must not know what she is doing, characterizing the work as sophomoric.
Guest judge Andres Serrano poignantly states, “for me this is one of the more interesting pieces
because it's disturbing, it made me think of homeless people that made me think of all the people
we don't want to look at, and especially when we were speaking about your work in front of you
like you didn’t exist, that also is uncomfortable.” The indication to the viewer is that of failure.
29
Yet there is a characteristic twinkle in Nao’s expression which indicates her success in her intent
as a performer and educator who embraces failure and the journey of discovery as opposed to the
overvalued marketable result. Her success in subverting the comical premise of the show is not
due to her control as a maker, but rather her acceptance of her lack of agency in her own
representation within this produced for reality television context. On her successes in failure
Bustamante states:
The audience’s fear of failure is built into the genre – it can be what keeps
performance art in dialogue and in tension with other mediums like theatre, sport
and dance. Where artists associated with traditional practices of those genres work
towards a “successful” spectacle, a performance artist is more likely to work on
the edge of disaster – making work that bores, that rattles, that seems to have no
“art” in it, or that seems somehow to have too much. Critics have manifested the
fear of failure in their discourse on Bravo’s show by assuming that only a failed
artist would turn to such a thing in order to “make it” or that an artist’s exit from
the program might represent a failure in and of itself, as if winning the contest
were the only aim that a participant in such a show might have
30

29
Ibid.
30
Doyle and Bustamante. “Guest Stars .”

21

As they have done with reality television, artists use the social media landscape as a site
for critical inquiry into self representation within democratized accessible modalities. Moving
from the television screen to the smartphone affords access to a different often younger audience,
subject to a perpetual onslaught of both surveillance and gender norms assembled through
hidden algorithmic structures. Amalia Ulman’s 2014 Instagram performance, Excellences and
Perfection, interestingly comments on both on the app’s dubious association to concepts of
authenticity and the positionality of the femme performance artist. Prior to the creation of the
piece Ulman already enjoyed a highly regarded career as a young artist to watch, using social
media to promote her work. Her Instagram presence suddenly took an unexpected turn, she
31
dyed her hair blonde, filled her profile with provocative selfies, and used hashtags such as
#dolceandgabbana and #brunch to attract a total of 90,000 followers. Excellences and Perfection
is located in a long-standing tradition of women artists development of fictional characters to
document serial acts of self-representation. Ulman’s five month performance exposes the
mechanics of performances of self that are unique to the structure of Instagram. The crash and
burn narrative of her character archived in her feed progresses through a number of familiar
internet girl archetypes, rising and falling from cutesy kawaii aesthetic, scorned hustler, to
revived health and wellness yogi. In Girls, Autobiography, Media : Gender and Self-Mediation
in Digital Economies Emma Maguire writes:
Ulman says that what she wanted to do with the piece was to show femininity as a
construction rather than something natural and, particularly, by drawing on
contemporary social media conventions for feminine self-presentation, to show
31
As Emma Maguire describes the situation: “ In 2013 she was singled out by Serpentine Galleries director
Hans-Ulrich Obrist as a young artist to watch.” Maguire, Emma. “Hoaxing Instagram: Amalia Ulman Exposes the
Tropes of #Instagirlhood.” Girls, Autobiography, Media : Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies ,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 175

22

how femininity is being constructed in spaces like Instagram-in image-based,
networked , social media.
32

The archetypes developed by Ulman are enhanced and defined by the technologies through
which they are built. The selfies and posts throughout her feed align the performance with
pre-existing signifiers of authenticity, cycling through a number of color palettes and filters
commonly used by women on Instagram. Her work exposes the constructed nature of the
instagirl aesthetic but also exposes the rejection of femme coded self representation within a
33
fine art context. Her reputation as a serious artist suffered during the duration of her
performance. Cute selfies, nail-art, lattes, and brunch did not align with the art world expectation
of her image. The acceptance of the performance as a serious work came after a panel discussion
she participated in a month after her last post at the Institute of Contemporary Art London,
revealing the fictional nature of her recent posts. Macguire states:
Ulman explains that her aim for the project was to “appropriate the most popular ‘it
girl’ trends on Instagram” in order to explore the question “How is a female artist
supposed to look like? How is she supposed to behave?” (ICA 2014). It was not the
Instagram audience that Ulman was attempting to deceive, but rather the
gatekeepers of the art world.
34

32
Emma Maguire “Hoaxing Instagram: Amalia Ulman Exposes the Tropes of #Instagirlhood.” Girls,
Autobiography, Media : Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 178.
33
Maguire in her description of the instagirl states, “An illustrative description of the popular conception of
Instagram Girl comes from Elle magazine, which, in October 2016, ran a story about young women who were
gaining large audiences on the platform. The article, in its description of the ‘Insta-Girl,’ anticipates an audience that
is already familiar with her: ‘You know the M.O.—beautiful girls perpetually strolling through an Italian sun-lit
street or lying on a Caribbean beach, freshly cracked coconut in hand and some expert lighting in place. Girls whose
Instagram feeds are as beautiful and curated as the pages of a glossy, and whose personal brands are as successful as
their filter choices’ (Elle). The Instagirl is a lifestyle blogger and social media influencer who uses her self-brand to
advertise products on social media, and she is an increasingly pervasive identity in the media landscape. Part of the
Instagirl’s appeal is that she is potentially just an ordinary girl, ‘walking among us on the street or maybe even
sitting beside us in lecture halls’ but one whose Instagram account depicts ‘a kind of fashion and lifestyle utopia’
(Nolan). But the Instagirl has a special status as an identity that can sell products to consumers.” Ibid., 24.
34
Ibid., 176.

23

The work of Nao Bustamante and Amalia Ulman exploits elements of both contemporary
modes of self representation through reality TV and social media to self representation within
fine art contexts. This comparison exposes limitations and allowances for makers and performers
within each circumstance, revealing the narrow expectation for women in contemporary art.

VI. Femme Representation within Reality Television and the Art Historical Precedent
@Uncannysfvalley afforded me accessibility to audiences within and outside the art
world. As with video artists working in the 1970’s, the formulation of my embodiment and
viewership is directly tied to the technology available to me. As my tools have expanded beyond
the phone and social media to the gallery context, I have brought those influences and viewers
with me. This change adds an expanded critical consideration to my investigations into
contemporary and historical examples of femme represention while maintaining my accessible
mass culture perspective demonstrated by how I procure and enact my source material. All of my
work is engaged in a similar hierarchical collapse similar to Bustamante and Ulman’s practices. I
am investigating the relationship between what is generally considered high and low culture,
particularly within the context of the representation of women throughout visual culture. Rather
than using my own image to elucidate questions surrounding these seemingly opposing
constructs of embodiment, I use found images of other women to activate these relationships.
My ongoing video project, Knowing Others and Wanting to Be Known, is created with found
video footage through a process of collage using After Effects and various apps on my phone.
(Fig. 7) It exists as a kind of response or continuation to my Instagram account
@uncannysfvalley, free from the systems of censorship which threatens my work on the app.

24

Again, indicating how this shift in technological substrate from using my phone to access mass
audiences to working with a computer making video work within the gallery context signifies a
change in process, audience, and forms of transmission. Using found video gives the work,
which functions through the same logic of collage as @uncannysfvalley, the new dimensions of
time, movement, and voice, not available through the creation of still images. The piece is
comprised of thirty second to about two minute long episodes strung together to create a longer
piece. Each episode added to the last, creating a binge watching experience for the viewer, fit to
the Instagram sized attention span. This episodic logic creates a video work with no end, similar
to an Instagram feed which function as both an archive and individual piece, one that I can
continue to add to forever. The overall tone of the work is a dreamy, pink, atmospheric digital
environment, punctuated with anxiety inducing female figures from reality television, art history
references, and net iconography.
The episode which most clearly enacts this hierarchical collapse is Who Do You Think
You Are I Am. The episode begins with promotional footage from Marina Abromovic’s
performance, The Artist Is Present in a digital rendering of an austere white space, reminiscent of
a gallery taken and including the logo from a stock image website. (Fig 8, 9) We see a close up
of Abromovic, her eyes directed at the floor. Her gaze slowly meets the lens of the camera set to
the melancholic score from the film Interstellar. She disappears and her gaze is met by a reaction
shot of Lisa Rina from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, responding with an expression of cool
suspicion. The score builds and so do the expressions of Marina and various real housewives,
both eventually moved to tears. It is unclear who is affecting whom, and the final scene shows
Marina waving to a loving, applauding crowd. She touches her heart as she faces her adoring

25

fans and a voice enters. The found audio comes from a viral video of a man getting a winning
strike in a bowling competition met by enthusiastic applause. Overcome with emotion he
exclaims, “God damnit yes, are you kidding me that’s right… who do you think you are I am?!”
Marina’s performance, based in the moving experience of the viewers encounter with her in the
gallery space, fits well with this man’s elation at his own personhood. Not to mention the
statement, “who do you think you are I am,” in my opinion is just about the most internet thing
I’ve ever heard. Marina’s emotional embodiment and expression moves her viewers to tears, she
attempts to reach the crescendo of drama I seek within my own work. The difference between
her work and my own is the path to this emotional response within her work employs concepts of
authenticity tied to “high” art whereas my own work uses accessible lexicons of popular culture
and online communication. Placing her reactions against the reactions of the women of Real
Housewives , which are also tied to a similar signification of authenticity through a reality TV
framework, exposes the similarities of their performances rather than their differences. In Amelia
Jones’s article, “ The Artist is Present: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,”
the parallels between the spectacle of this performance and real housewives is measurable. Her
critique of the work comes from an acknowledgment of the contradictory nature of attempting to
access the authenticity of Abramovic’s presence, while being watched, photographed, and
documented in the stage-like setting of the gallery. Jones states:
The live act marks the body, understood as an expression of the self, as
representational. Thus, as someone who sat across from Abramovic; in the atrium
of MoMA, surrounded by a barrier like a boxing ring, itself surrounded by dozens
of staring visitors, cameras, and lit by klieg lights, I can say personally I found the
exchange to be anything but energizing, personal, or transformative.
35

35
Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR/The
Drama Review , vol. 55, no. 1 (2011), 18.

26

The performative live act enjoys a connotation of authenticity, as does the reality TV
performance. Yet the inherent context of being watched and documented while performing an
embodiment of something “real” destroys any capacity for access to the real unedited person.
The truth is that there is no performance of self outside of the enactment of social constructs. On
a macro and micro level, the fixed identity of self never appears without the inherent
acknowledgement of the gaze. Jones points out the impossibility of resolved authentic presence:
“Presence” as commonly understood is a state that entails the unmediated
co-extensivity in time and place of what I perceive and myself; it promises a
transparency to an observer of what “is” at the very moment at which it takes
place. But the event, the performance, by combining materiality and durationality
(its enacting of the body as always already escaping into the past) points to the
fact that there is no “presence” as such.
36

Who Do You Think You Are I Am relates the impossibility of the authenticity of the observed
subject within reality television and performance art. There are more similarities between these
modes of self representation than there are differences, raising the question: what makes one art
and the other trash? Raymond Williams recognized the necessity in the analyzation of the
elements of culture which exist outside the pursuit of human perfection, “And the discovery of
permanent contributions will lead to the same kind of general analysis, if we accept the process
at this level, not as human perfection (a movement towards deter- mined values), but as a part of
man's general evolution, to which many individuals and groups contribute. Every element that
we analyse will be in this sense active: that it will be seen in certain real relations, at many
different levels.”
37
36
Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR/The
Drama Review , vol. 55, no. 1 (2011), 18.
37
Williams, “The Analysis of Culture.” 53.

27

An artist who implicitly understands the need for the neutral criticality in our engagement
with popular culture is Ann Hirsch. Hirsch was in grad school in 2008 and she recognized a
shift in the media landscape. With the massive influx of new forms of distribution our ability as
users/ performers to enact our selfhood had shifted. In her 2011 talk Why Reality TV she
explained:
I saw a lot of potential there because before we didn’t have control but now, in
my utopian head, as women we can take back our imagery we can take back our
sense of representation, we can represent ourselves. So I saw that, potentially, we
are living in this great era where we can start to change stereotypes, we can start
to change the way that people think and observe and the male gaze.
38

Hirsch acknowledges the utopic potential for agency supplied by reality TV which she put to the
test in her 2010 performance, Performing Reality. The performance was her ten-day appearance
on VH1’s A Basement Affair, a dating show spinoff of I Love New York which was a spinoff of
the classic, Flavor of Love. The premise of A Basement Affair was of fifteen women competing
for the affections of Frank the Entertainer while living in his family home. His character was
illustrated as a thirty something unemployed loser who lived with his parents, attracting the most
fame desperate suitors producers could find. Hirsch enjoyed a brief stint of viral Youtube fame
prior to her reality television debut; performing in hopes of realizing her utopic vision of femme
self representation. She found the women in that community perpetuating gender stereotypes
rather than subverting them. She saw the same thing occur with women on reality television
39
and wanted to test the limits of her own performative agency within the structure of A Basement
Affair. Hirsch describes her gradual realization that, despite producers telling her and the rest of
38
Hirsch states, "A talk about why I went on reality TV to make art and how I did it." Part of the Panoply
Conference at Vaudeville Park on November 11th, 2011. Ann Hirsch, “Why Reality TV?” Vimeo , 28 Feb. 2020,
vimeo.com/33741319.
39
Ibid

28

the contestants that eliminations were based on Franks own preference, the process was entirely
decided by preset storylines. She quickly realized that her only way out of the role written for her
was through the careful sabotage. To reclaim her sense of control during a “crooning challenge”
she broke out into a hyper sexual rap to subvert productions squeaky clean image of her. Doing it
during a challenge ensured that the production had to show it, allowing her to be eliminated on
terms which were uniquely her own. Hirsch describes the purpose of the performance:
The idea was to provide viewers with this little awkward blip in their normal
viewing or way they see reality tv. These girls that you see, you’re really only
seeing what the production wants you to see there is actually this whole side, and
you thought I was this sweet girl and actually that’s a complete construction
whether it’s a construction by me or mainly by production it is a construction. The
goal was just to throw a wrench in the production if only momentarily.
40

Hirsch’s performance succeeds in subverting the corporate filter, if only for a moment, and
provides viewers with the thing that delights them the most, the miraculous moments in these
shows when we can see the faintest glimmer of the constructed person behind the constructed
narrative.
Hirsch and I share a unique quality as makers engaged with the subject matter of reality
television; we are true fans. Though I have never appeared on reality TV, my perspective is
similar to hers. My work comes from dedicated love for the genre and its utopic potential with
the simultaneous understanding of its disempowering effects within femme representation
through its rienforcement of oppresive heteronormative gender constructs. I have been drawn to
reality television since high school because most representations of women throughout history
have been authored by men. Despite its constructed nature, reality TV marks the first time I, and
40
Ibid

29

many other people in my generation, have seen such a large number of women authoring their
supposed own story within mass culture. True fans know that what we’re seeing isn’t real, and
the appeal has more to do with the place between the performed and the authentic. My series of
41
pastel drawings Who is She? is about that strange location existing between the real and the
performed, both in the represented subject, and within ourselves. This series of drawings works
through a generative process of both physical and digital manipulation. I take images of women
in heightened emotional states from art history or reality television. I crop and enhance the most
dramatic aspect of their expression using the liquify tool in photoshop. (This tool is usually used
to make women look skinnier, to make their eyes or breasts bigger, etc.) I then physically
manipulate the image by drawing it. I scan the drawing and repeat the process, each
manipulation of the image resulting in a new piece. The manipulation of the expression oscillates
between a digital stretching and pulling using the liquify tool, and a physical pull of intricate
webs of lines using the pastel crayon. Arriving at an image which I have stretched and pulled to
achieve its most emotionally heightened state, as within reality TV seeking the crescendo of
drama. What is left is an ambiguous expression that the viewer can then fill with their own
trauma.
My interest in representations of femme hysteria comes mostly from my favorite reality
TV shows, the Real Housewives franchise from the network Bravo. I’ve seen every episode,
from every city starting in 2006 when I was a junior in high school. Watching these housewives
proclaim the realness of their experience while simultaneously reperforming physical emotional
41
In a 2005 Associated Press/ TV guide poll, “participants indicated that they did not believe reality TV was real,
but they also didn’t care that much” 25% of polled subjects said that it is complete fiction, 57% said they show a
combination of truth and fiction, and only 30% said that mattered to them. Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray.
“Introduction .” Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture . (New York: NYU Press, 2009) 8.

30

signifiers of duress, makes me question my own lexicon of emotionality. Mythologies of
hysterical women within the art historical cannon, depicted in scenes such as Susanna and the
elders, Cassandra, the rape of Persopina, and the ecstasy of St. Teresa, have been predominantly
authored by men. Comparing expressions of contemporary figures to representations of
hysterical women within art history indicates the truncated nature of our own range of physical
expressions. It also illustrates how the representation of women has been written for us, not by
us, and is therefore part of a vast social construct that stretches far beyond Real Housewives .
Hirsch acknowledges that her performance of self, in both life and on A Basement Affair, is a
construction. As I previously stated, all of my work operates within a system of collapse of
hierarchies between high art and low mass culture. In Who is She? my comparison between
contemporary figures and those from within art history indicate that the constructed system of
femme representation has changed very little. The work of Williams in “The Analysis of
Culture” speaks to the way in which these gender constructs are sustained through thzz eir
continual repeated representation: “meanings and values, discovered in particular societies and
by particular individuals, and kept alive by social inheritance and by embodiment in particular
kinds of work, have proved to be universal in the sense that when they are learned, in any
particular situation, they can contribute radically to the growth of man’s powers to enrich his life,
to regulate his society, and to control his environment.” This quote demonstrates the ways in
42
which gender constructs are instantiated over time through varied forms of embodiment. These
series of drawings are about a question to myself, where do I, me, some sort of authentic fixed
personhood, end and where does the learned inherited cultural construct begin?
42
Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” 43 .

31

VII. Decontextualization and the Infinite Free Exchange of Poor Images Through Social
Media Networks
There is a rich history within net art of work that highlights the infinite flow of
decontextualized images on the internet and the processes of searching and archiving as an
artistic practice itself. This work reflects the unprecedented global exchange of images made
possible by the internet; pushed further by the development of extended social networking
architectures of sharing within the Web 2.0 era. Most of the content used by these artists can be
categorized as “poor images” as defined by Hito Steyerl’s seminal work In Defense of The Poor
Image. She defines a poor image as:
a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of
appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has
been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms
quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips,
contemplation into distraction.
43

Rather than the classist value placed on high resolution images, whose production is dependent
on technologies which are only accessible to the privileged few, the value of the poor image is
located in its visible degradation through democratized practices of sharing. These cycles and
transfers of user generated content have significant implications for contemporary self-imaging
practices. The relationship between net art practice and technology is what creates such a strong
parallel to video art created in the 1970’s. The language for self imaging in both periods is
shaped, facilitated, and produced by the limitations and allowances of the technology and its
43
Hito Steyerl. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” The Wretched of the Screen , (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009) 32.

32

newfound accessibility. The work of the artist’s in the following section, including my own,
expose these systems of exchange and use the resulting images as their found subject.
A number of net art practitioners of the early 2000’s used sharing architectures of the
internet as their primary medium. “Pro Surfer” is a term developed by net art collective Nasty
Nets , an “internet surf club,” who collectively found, arranged, and remixed online content to
post to the Nasty Net website. Nasty Nets were one of many such collectives whose works and
44
processes manifested in a series of surf blogs including, Supercentral, Double Happiness,
Loshadka, and Spirit Surfers. Their medium was the practice of sharing and expansion which
were made possible by technological developments in social media and internet mobility. The
resulting blogs work as both an archive and body of work, functioning as a kind of collective,
living, user-generated collage, all elements, altered, then living together in the same space
creating new meaning. Artist Kevin Brewersdorf, a member of Spirit Surfers who sought to
associate the act of searching to an intuitive shamanistic act of ritual discovery, states about the
medium, “surf clubs championed the idea that searching was equivalent to making, a form of
craft.” In their manifesto he explains, “perhaps finding is making, but finding is not enough,”
45
characterizing his posts as, “jewels publicly removed and reset.” These artists specialize in the
46
use and then mis-use of these technologies to point to the decontextualized nature of the online
poor images which are then recreated into something new.
The member of the pro surfer era whose work most poignantly comments on these
practices as they relate to internet self-imaging practices is Petra Cortright. Her 2007 Youtube
44
Marisa Olson. “Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture.” Mass Effect:Art and the
Internet in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015) 159.
45
Ceci Moss. “Internet Explorers .” Mass Effect:Art and the Internet in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015) 149.
46
Ibid,. 150.

33

video work entitled, VVebcam, again, are situated within the rich cannon of women engaged in
serial self-imaging bodies of work. This work is specifically tied to the seemingly banal preset
47
effects which indicate a cyclical net aesthetic still being reproduced today in the form of
Snapchat and Instagram filters. Cortright stares blankly into the camera as the pictorial field is
filled with online iconography of images such as dancing pizza and lighting bolts, very clip-art
reminiscent. The highly accessible nature of the added images and Cortright disengaged stare
indicates a state of “disinterested delight,” an effect that still characterizes so much of online
48
self-representation prevalent today on social networking sites. It also points to the newfound
accessibility of self-imaging practices with her use of the off the shelf webcam and the indistinct
nature of the graphics used in her works. Ceci Moss explains in her essay “Internet Explorers,”
“unlike the amateur photographers in past decades who aspired towards professionalism, the user
is interested in the pure and immediate functionality of his tools, often realized through defaults.”
She goes on to say, “artists like Cortright are specifically attentive to software’s function, a move
that draws up the vocabulary and register of these functions as absorbed by the web’s mass
audience.” Relating back to Steyerl’s poor image and the value that can be placed on the
49
infinite exchange of an image, rather than it’s associations of professionalism and high
resolution, pro surfers and Petra Cortright make a comment on the user as maker, and the
47
Emma Macguire elaborates on the potential for Instagram as platform for this practice as an ideal extension into
the digital, “Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2002, 7) explain that women artists’ experiments with serial
self-presentation via mediums like performance, photography, and film have opened up a ‘frequent and multifaceted
exploration of seriality itself, of self-presentation in time’ at the interface of visuality and textuality. Instagram
practitioners, particularly those like Ulman who are interrogating the platform’s functions and norms around
presenting the self over time, can be seen as extending this exploration into digital territory.” Emma Maguire
“Hoaxing Instagram: Amalia Ulman Exposes the Tropes of #Instagirlhood.” Girls, Autobiography, Media : Gender
and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 170.
48
Chan, Paul. “Artist Favorites.” Spike Art Quarterly , 2010, p. 23.
49
Moss, Ceci. “Internet Explorers .” Mass Effect:Art and the Internet in the Twenty First Century , MIT Press, 2015,
pp. 150

34

vernacular of amateurism which characterizes all online image making and exchange practices.
Social media practice and exposes the direct tie between technological substrate and platform
and thus audience. Creating work for @Uncannysfvalley using and transmitting through my
iPhone both pulls from and pushes back into the everyday user lexicon.
I have already addressed the social function of @uncannysfvalley and it is also essential
to unpack the technical implications of the use of digital collage and its relationship to the online
decontextualized images and mobile technologies. As I stated previously, every collage I make
for my Instagram is made on my phone. Like Petra Cortright and the pro surfers of the early
2000’s this work is both created through and commenting on highly accessible technologies and
user generated content. I started making collages on my phone because I didn’t have a computer
when I started my account. In fact, I still don’t really understand how to use photoshop. The
democratizing potential of the use of an app which costs 99 cents on such widely spread user
friendly phone technology has always been exciting to me. It is work which situates its creation
in the realm of the masses rather than employing tools available only to the privileged few, as
expressed in Steyerl’s exaltation of democratized content and means of exchange. I make work
that in fact anyone with a phone could make, given that they have the virtually masochistic levels
of patience and dedication (perhaps more like addiction) required for me to build this body of
work and unique skill set. I had been on Tumblr for a few years collecting images, I didn’t know
how, but I knew I would use them one day. My hope with @uncannysfvalley is to create images
and worlds which provide a glimpse into my felt internal reality without the image of my
corporeal embodiment employing found digital material as actors and signifiers. My work, as
with that of many of the aforementioned artists, fits in the cannon of femme serial self

35

representation using images of other women as my stand in. If the projection of self is always
informed by social constructs, it makes sense to build a personal narrative using the images
which inform those constructs, especially as they relate to web specific content. For example, the
portrayal of women's bodies, significantly pornographic material, is almost always authored by
men for men. Young people attain their sexual education from the consumption of online
pornography, often before, if ever, having it contextualized by an adult, be it their parents, in
school or otherwise. This means that the majority of representations of femme sexuality (and for
that matter all other forms of media), coming from the point of view of the male gaze, is
informing the heteronormative constructs of sexuality both women and men will be subject to in
the future. Perhaps this has always been true, but this material has never been more widely
accessible or dispersed than it is today online, which is why I choose to use this pornographic
material created by men in order to construct a representation of my own sexuality, subverted
and activated by material of my own choosing through a process of collage. The work goes far
beyond the representation of my sexuality; the benefit of working in such a massive quantity of
multiples is that I have the freedom to talk about whatever I want. I have always said I will run
out of ideas when the internet runs out of pictures, which may occur sooner than I had ever
considered at the outset of this project, with ever tightening decency standards and censorship
practices on apps such as tumblr and Instagram where I collect material, and Google’s continual
structural adjustments to image searches, meant to protect image copyright. The idea of
authorship has always prominently featured in my (and arguably all) collage practices, given that
the work entails cobbling together images from elsewhere. This decontextualization is
particularly apparent in contemporary digital collage with the availability and

36

decontextualization of images found online. In a way I don’t “make” anything; I steal things that
already exist and recontextualize them to make new meaning. Similar to the attitudes expressed
by pro surfers, for me finding is not enough; it is how I choose to activate this content which is
the work itself. Pointing to the logic of user generated image sharing architectures specific to the
era of Web 2.0.
Another place in which the decontextualized nature of image sharing figures prominently
within my work is in several of the episodes of Knowing Others and Wanting to be Known. The
inclusion of logos of companies such as Bravo, Jezebel, Shutterstuck, and ABC foregrounds the
fact that these videos have original locations of origin. This acknowledgement also indicates the
formation of my own identity through the consumption of material generated through the
systems of these corporate entities.

VIII. The Myth of Authenticity
Raymond Williams’s concept of structures of feeling demonstrates the interconnectivity
amongst all aspects of life to the resulting forms of embodiment and communication. The ways
in which we perform and enact our conceptions of self hood are deeply connected to the forms of
technology which are available, influenced over time by prior advancements. Fifty years ago, in
the 1970’s, the forms of artistic production related to embodiment were directly tied to newly
accessible technological advancements such as the handheld video camera and real time
playback through newly available monitors. The resulting works from artists like Richard Serra
and Nancy Holt, Lynda Benglis, and Vito Acconci used the states of a collapsed present and
material confusion made possible by these widely available technologies revealing their complex

37

relationship to their own corporeal embodiment. Since that time, there has been a rapid blur
between our public and private lives within mass culture. In the post-9/11 era both new
technologies and ideological shifts towards the acceptance of surveillance culture gave way to
our insatiable thirst to know others and to be known. The entertainment value of this exposure
employed by reality television in the early 2000’s gave rise to social media and the dominance of
the transmission and consumption of our selfhood. Many contemporary artists including myself,
Nao Bustamante, Amelia Ulman, Ann Hirsch, and Petra Cortright acknowledge the significance
of these cultural phenomena. Their and my own use of serial self representation, and direct
interventions within these platforms reveal the truncated nature of oppressive gender constructs
within the history of femme representation, both in the art world and mass culture. These works
raise questions about the agency of the user/maker within these corporate controlled
technologies, forms of production, and consumption, despite their inherent ties to ideologies of
authenticity.
Within my own work, @uncannysfvalley uses democratized smartphone technology and
the sharable consumable logic of Instagram, to circumvent the usual paths to visibility for
contemporary artists. Though I recognize the disempowering effects of these highly surveyed
and censored corporate platforms of social media, their contributions to my visibility as an artist
are demonstrable. Moving from my phone to computer, from mass youth culture to the more
academic gallery context, the influences I carry with me from this work connect the macro to the
micro. They bring the otherwise discarded seemingly superficial, feminine coded signifiers of
social media and reality television to the critical exclusionary audiences engaged with
contemporary art. My video work in Knowing Others and Wanting to be Known add the

38

dimensions of time, space, and voice to my otherwise static collage practice. Using found video
material from reality television and the internet, I am able to compile a detailed survey of my
popular culture consumption habits. The result is an episodic binge watching experience which
serves as both an archive and body of work, unpacking my experience of the construction of
gender within mass media. My drawing series Who is She? works through a generative process
of both physical and digital manipulation to reveal the history of the representation of femme
expression and emotion. Both bodies of work reiterate the interconnectivity of all forms of
culture, technological, felt, and represented to the ways in which we engage in the daily
performance of self.
A few conclusions are illustrated by the preceding analysis. One being that social media
and reality television have had a significant impact on the ways in which we perform and
transmit our selfhood. They are elements of mass culture which influenced each other and
developed together within my lifetime. Though both these genres have significant ties to ideas of
authenticity, their constructed nature reveals the impossibility of the performance of authentic
self. The work of Raymond Williams illustrates the interconnectivity of all elements of culture
past, present, and projected future, to the analysis of the whole. This interconnectivity goes
beyond external reality and is measurable within internal experience. Claims to authentic
presence or self are invalid, though proclamations of such “genuine” performance seem to
endlessly capture our fascination. Perhaps this fascination can be attributed to our underlying
knowledge that there is no self that exists outside of cultural construct. When we perform
emotion, or gender, when we post a selfie or watch tv trying to catch a glimpse of the “real”
person beyond the screen, there is a nagging awareness that there is no real self available for the

39

purposes of consumption or enactment outside of culture and environment. My work is forever
excavating the line between subjective reality, and culture, endlessly searching for any
delineation between the location of selfhood, and consumed culture.

Figures:

Figure 1. Boomerang , Richard Serra, 1974, single-channel video, color, with
sound, 10 min Serra, Richard. “Richard Serra. Boomerang. 1974: MoMA.” The
Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/143808

40

Figure 2. Now! , Lynda Benglis, 1973, Single-channel digital video, transferred
from video tape, color, sound, 12 min. “Lynda Benglis.” Onassis,
onassisusa.org/bio/lynda-benglis

Figure 3. On Screen , Lynda Benglis, 1972, single-channel video, color, with
sound, 7 min “On Screen.” On Screen | Video Data Bank,
www.vdb.org/titles/screen

41

Figure 4. Command Performance , Vito Acconci, video installation, mixed media
video installation with sound, 56 min 40 sec. “Vito Acconci, Command
Performance, 1974 · SFMOMA.” Vito Acconci, Command Performance, 1974 ·
SFMOMA, www.sfmoma.org/artwork/90.325/

Figure 5. Kitty IV Collage , Casey Kauffmann, 2014, iPhone collage, 640 x 640
pixels. Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/caseykauffmann/

42

Figure 6. #attentionseeker, Casey Kauffmann, 2015, iPhone collage, 640 x 640 pixels.
Instagram, www.instagram.com/p/xqPUhhMMt7/ .

Figure 7. Knowing Others and Wanting to be Known , Casey Kauffmann, 2020, video still, single
channel video collage, color, sound, 18 min 30 sec

43

Figure 8. Knowing Others and Wanting to be Known: Who Do You Think You
Are I Am , Casey Kauffmann, 2020, video still single channel video collage, color,
sound, 18 min 30 sec

Figure 9. Knowing Others and Wanting to be Known: Who Do You Think You
Are I Am , Casey Kauffmann, 2020, video still single channel video collage, color,
sound, 18 min 30 sec



44

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Moss, Ceci. “Internet Explorers .” Mass Effect:Art and the Internet in the Twenty First Century ,
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Asset Metadata

Creator Kauffmann, Casey (author)

Core Title Social media, reality television, and the contemporary performance of self

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 05/13/2020

Defense Date 05/12/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1970s,1990's,2000s,archive art,Art History,collage,contemporary art,critical media,digital art,digital collage,feminism,feminist art,femme representation,found material,Hysteria,image economies,Instagram,interdisciplinary art,Internet art,iPhone,net art,new genres,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art,phone art,popular culture,reality television,reality TV,self representation,social media,social networking sites,structures of feeling,surveillance culture,Technology,Tumblr,Video,video art,video collage,Web 2.0

Language English

Advisor West, Jennifer (committee chair), Arceneaux, Edgar (committee member), Jones, Amelia (committee member)

Creator Email cbkauffm@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-305381

Unique identifier UC11666204

Identifier etd-KauffmannC-8499.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-305381 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KauffmannC-8499.pdf

Dmrecord 305381

Document Type Thesis

Rights Kauffmann, Casey

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This text is an analysis of the influence of social media and reality television on the contemporary performance of self. With consideration to artistic practice this research accounts for the technological advancements of the past fifty years and the co-evolution of these cultural phenomena.