Over the last few months, my experience with COVID, and doing my part to keep my community safe through social distancing, has led me to feel increasingly disconnected from my outside reality. This has been exacerbated by my reliance on online communication– through direct messaging and social media– to keep up to date with my friends, community, and the world around me. The constant influx of faceless notifications and data, has changed my once personal, valuable, and intimate relationship with virtual communication to one that is isolating, othering, and void of meaning.
When I was prompted to create a digital Self Portrait through metadata (information/data collected about users data) I was drawn back to thinking about my relationship to this now seemingly solitary, one-sided method of interaction. This work, coded with HTML, shows a web browser with hundreds of black squares, which when interacted with by the user by mousing over the page, flip to reveal one example of my online communication metadata (time, sent or received, to how many, app used, type of message, and who the message is from/to).
Considering how as participants in online culture we are constantly tracked by our metadata, I wanted to create a visual representation of attempts to decoding value and meaning from my personal communications. Through the separation of body language from communication, emotion is lost. In the same way, metadata taken from online communication separates the user from content, and meaning is lost.
Is my metadata more real than the emotion taken from it?
