Foucault, Memes and Instagram
Challenge
Alter Ego - Make work as someone else
To better understand the relationship between research and creating, thinking and making, and to bring the research closer to my own work, we spent a few weeks making work as someone else. To find the connections between the people I was reading and my own art/design practice, I would embody their thinking to create a new original work as if I were them.
Guide
Prof. Jarrett Fuller
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, Instagram
Timeline
3 weeks, Fall 2019
Process
Find a person + research them + embody them + create / experiment
Below are the steps that I took for this project:
- Find a person from my research who could be influential to my own thesis. This can be a writer, a researcher, an artist, or another designer. It can be someone from history or someone still alive.
- Research this person’s life and work to get an understanding of how they work and how their work influences your own work.
- Make a piece of work as if you are that person. You are not making something for that person or about that person but rather making a work of art from that person.
- Think about the form this work can take and how that form is influenced by the person.
Design Response
Author Michel Foucault expressing himself via Instagram
I embodied author Michel Foucault. Imagining how Foucault would be fascinated by social media sites like Instagram and express his opinion on the usage of memes in digital culture via an anonymous account and multiple stories using his quotes.
The stories gained a lot of views and made me realize how social media sites have made self-expression so easy and influential.
In this age of remixing, memes are those bits of cultural information that are not owned by any one person and shared by thousands everyday. And this change in the concept of ownership is exactly what the chosen French philosopher and author Michel Foucault articulated in his 1969 essay ‘What is an Author?’ He pursued an interesting approach in illuminating the meaning of the term ‘author’ and delineated the role of an author not as the creator of discourse but as an 'author-function' — the author as the function of discourse.
Although he died in 1984, his work feels particularly timely right now as it is largely about knowledge, truth and power. Memes, with the advent of social media like instagram and twitter have evolved into movements and activisms whose power then lies simply in the will and passion of the people who represent it. Personally motivated, these people bring an unrestrained enthusiasm that can carry a motion through the challenges that typically accompany change.
This digital artifact is what I believe Michel Foucault would have embraced and used as a tool to express his opinion in today’s world of memes! It explores the transformative power of memes and their flexible nature to mold as per people’s will in the voice of Michel Foucault and by being able to do this I have tried to live up to the qualities of memes to be interpretative, molded, transformed, mutated and eventually be evolved.