New technology and the digital imaging revolution have changed the meaning of communication and representation. Through this online network, the human body is confronted with the immense sense of interaction and confusion when the traditional physical self is notpresent as much as the online self. Digital images reveal excessive fascination with self-representation through taking and sharing selfies (self-portraits). Young women and girls utilize the new platform to embody self-revelation, self-production, or even self-sexualization as a part of their liberation and freedom of choice. The new body – self – goes beyond the traditional boundaries of human physical existence, and denies essentialism by performing, changing, morphing, and fragmenting to create confusion of boundaries and the “spatial self.” Online representation of self attempts to perform who the woman is based on where she goes, what she captures and what she shares. My intent is to illustrate how photography can generate multiple identities through the spatial self, the selves that can reflect or deflect self-objectification or construct agency for women.
The location-based identities exist and represent where the person is located socially and spatially through the interaction of people with culture, space, and new technology. In this paper, I analyze Instagram photos of young Iranian women and girls dated 2013 to present. I will explore three diverse approaches to show how women construct spatial and political selves through performance of the body in different positions and locations, including or excluding geocode locations, from private to public places.
The practice of taking selfies in Iran represents the authority of photography in exploring and representing a passive or an active version of the self that may either embody mixed identities of mimicry culture or, alternatively, reveal identities that have been hidden through the limitation of the person in an actual space.
About the presenterMona Bozorgi
Mona Bozorgi is an artist-scholar whose interdisciplinary research and artistic practice focuses on the intersections of bodies and technology. Her work aims to provide alternative ways of understanding the contemporary self and its conversation with technology. This mode of exchange between humans and technologies and the materialization of the body through apparatuses inspired her to study their “intra-action.” Bozorgi is currently a doctoral candidate in Texas Tech University’s interdisciplinary Fine Arts program.