multi media installation * 2010

Compared to portrayals I have been working on in the past, in which my attention was focused on the way self-representational forms of a certain subject mutate within an heterogeneous context like Facebook, in The Furno’s Book the experimentation field is extended to a more dynamical and contemporary objet trouvé. By way of facebook I have begun to interact, through the fictional identity of Mrs Furno, with unknown people which shared Furno as same surname.

After having requested their virtual friendship, I have realized drawings of the photos chosen by each of them as “profile” picture and I have published them on my virtual Facebook profile. An exchange based on virtual interaction. Fictitious only under some aspects. Even if in the beginning the work was oriented toward a communication aimed to build a further fictional identity, the project evolve into a process that traces the map of a complex interactions net and especially underlines a metamorphosis -not only formal- of the photographic portrait and self-portrait in the contemporary society. Self-representation in the realm of social networks undertakes curious transformations. Digital technologies make the realization and the use of images in very short time’s lapses possible. Formally, the element that is mostly modified is the pose of the subject. These changes seem to occur in parallel to the intensifying of one’s “necessity” of documenting his own reality as much as his own “becoming” -or the becoming of his “character”?-. It is the representation of one of these realities that opens a perceptional space on fiction, where the average user of a virtual platform like Facebook can easily move between offered plausibilities and an existing biography available to the public.