2003–2006Painting
MySpace Portrait Paintings
Public profile data translated into paintings and video, returned to subjects' pages. 2003–2006.
In 2003, MySpace users were posting personal photographs, biographical details, and interior monologues onto public profiles with no established framework for understanding what public meant in a networked context. The platform had no privacy defaults worth noting. The data was available. The subjects had put it there themselves.
Leroy Brothers sourced this material — photographs, texts, profile details — and used it to produce paintings and videos. The works were then reposted directly onto the subjects' own MySpace pages. The subjects encountered paintings of themselves, made from data they had published, returned to the space where they had published it, without having been asked.
The project was not a commentary on data privacy. It was an enactment of it. The gap between what users understood they were doing when they posted and what could be done with what they posted was the medium. The paintings made that gap visible by crossing it.
The work ran from 2003 to 2006 — before Facebook reached mass adoption, before the iPhone introduced the front-facing camera as a standard feature, before "data privacy" entered legal vocabulary in any jurisdiction. The self-portrait as primary mode of online identity construction was not yet named.
"The MySpace Angle, today known as the selfie, became a new way of self-portraying."
— Urban Dictionary
Paintings and video. 2003–2006.
Leroy Brothers sourced this material — photographs, texts, profile details — and used it to produce paintings and videos. The works were then reposted directly onto the subjects' own MySpace pages. The subjects encountered paintings of themselves, made from data they had published, returned to the space where they had published it, without having been asked.
The project was not a commentary on data privacy. It was an enactment of it. The gap between what users understood they were doing when they posted and what could be done with what they posted was the medium. The paintings made that gap visible by crossing it.
The work ran from 2003 to 2006 — before Facebook reached mass adoption, before the iPhone introduced the front-facing camera as a standard feature, before "data privacy" entered legal vocabulary in any jurisdiction. The self-portrait as primary mode of online identity construction was not yet named.
"The MySpace Angle, today known as the selfie, became a new way of self-portraying."
— Urban Dictionary
Paintings and video. 2003–2006.