Brian Van Lau
Artist Feature
Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.
Franziska Ostermann - Selfobservations
Oct 19, 2022
What do the photographic self-portraits that wake in the networks as avatars do while we surf or sleep? Photographic splinters of views of ourselves represent our identity in a place that we ourselves cannot enter. The physicality itself becomes a barrier to its own representation. Photography can act as a mediator between the real and the virtual. In the form of a photograph, the body can cross the threshold from the physical, real world into the virtuality of the digital. But this transformation is not the exact opposite to its original form. The I transported is a different one. In photographs, views of faces become outsourced fragments of an ego that find their own identity in the virtuality of the digital and the Internet and develop a second reality, independent of their creator. They floatingly form a new shape. I examine these splinter identities, revolve around them and make them visible on the intermediate level between virtuality and reality. By directing multiple selfies on duplicated smartphones of past selves onto myself, I communicate with versions of myself and allow the views that are otherwise separated by time to meet in the pictorial space of photography. I assemble and interweave photographic elements in the virtual image space, condense temporal processes in the same way as I make the visual condensation of the virtual world visible.