Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok… there are many social networks that are part of our daily lives today, particularly of young teenagers through their use of smartphones. They chat, exchange photos and videos, voice their opinions, share their daily lives, get training and information through tutorials, for example. Their infatuation with these networks is not insignificant, and while the media and health professionals have rightly portrayed the risks and excesses, it has to be said that the “it was better before” attitude does not help to understand or raise awareness among young people of what they are doing and experiencing on the web. With this project, Gwendal Coulon proposes to use social networks as a medium and support for artistic and critical experimentation. Through practice, dialogue and misappropriation, the aim is to use one of these media to question its use, both individually and collectively, and to explore its creative potential.
Photos, videos, statuses, profiles, hashtags, POV (Point of View) … allow young teens to express, test and probe multiple facets of themselves, while feeling part of a community. Telling one’s story, playing up one’s identity, measuring one’s popularity, assessing one’s place in a peer group and beyond … are just as much issues common to social networks as, more broadly, to the construction of self in adolescence. Through a series of workshops and visits, the artist and participants will work together to create an avatar: this fictitious, highly anonymous character will be the result of a collective, plural cross-dressing, as well as the group’s many exchanges and experiments. It will be a tool designed and created for and by the group to examine and test its relationship with social networks.
A veritable digital masquerade, it will be first and foremost a way of experiencing JOMO (Joy of missing out), as opposed to FOMO (fear of missing out), which has long characterized the feeling of inferioritý of social network users who feel that, unlike the lives seen and liked on the social media, their own is dull and boring. It’s a question of analyzing and freeing ourselves from the idealized lives portrayed by the networks, and instead choosing to slow down and listen to our own needs. Different trends, #memes and remixes, via sport, fashion and music, will be critically and inventively invested by the group with the aim of thinking about this avatar, its identity and its fictitious life; all with humor, generosity, exaggeration, artificiality, theatricality and even eccentricity.