The Unreliable Image: Contemporary Art, Social Identity, & Self­Making in the Digital Age

A THESIS SUBMITTED ON APRIL 8, 2016 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS BY

Alex Santana

1 Acknowledgements

Why am I compelled to write?.... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger…. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self­autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing. ––Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers ​

Without the help of some amazing mentors, the process of writing this thesis would have been impossibly difficult. I would like to express my gratitude, first and foremost, to my thesis advisor, Vicki Mayer. She has both challenged and encouraged me to produce writing that is in line with my own passions. Her commitment to interdisciplinarity, intellectual effervescence, and persistent enthusiasm has been contagious and absolutely inspiring.

I would also like to acknowledge some professors who have grounded my thinking for this project, specifically Mónica Ramírez­Montagut, Delia Solomons, and

Jimmy Huck. With their thoughtful questions and feedback, the project has developed more nuanced insights and depth.

I express a heartfelt thank­you to my brother, Max, who has tutored me with his seemingly infinite digital literacy, as well as to my mother, whose wisdom and dedication has been indispensable to me during the writing process. Ultimately, I thank my partner,

Ryan, who reminds me that I am worthy when I need it most.

2 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………… 2

List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………… 4

Thesis Introduction ………………………………………………………………………… 6

Chapter I

Melancholy, Glitch, and Power: Rafia Santana’s Subversive Selfies ………………... 13

Chapter II

Digital Self­Making, Agency, and Surveillance Anxiety: The Post­Internet Image in the

Work of Hito Steyerl ………………………………………………………………………... 28

Chapter III

Historical Fetishism, Identity Tourism, and Self­Making on the Internet: Fluid Color in

Adriana Varejão’s Self­Portraits ………………………………………………………….. 41

Thesis Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………….. 60

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………... 62

Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………... 66

3 List of Figures

Figure 1: Frida Kahlo, El Venado Herido (The Wounded Deer), 1946 ​ ​ Figure 2: Frida Kahlo, La Columna Rota (The Broken Column), 1944 ​ ​ Figures 3­6: Carrie Mae Weems, Photographs from Kitchen Table Series, 1990 ​ ​ Figures 7­9: Ana Mendieta, Untitled and Imagen de Yagul from Silueta Series, México, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 1973­1980

Figure 10: Juliana Huxtable, Untitled (Destroying Flesh) from the UNIVERSAL CROP ​ ​ ​ TOPS FOR ALL THE SELF CANONIZED SAINTS OF BECOMING series, 2015 ​ Figure 11: Rafia Santana, Tired, 2014 ​ ​ ​ ​ Figure 12: Rafia Santana, Worked, 2015 ​ ​ ​ Figure 13: Rafia Santana, Very Little Sleep, 2015 ​ ​ ​ Figure 14: Hito Steyerl, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov ​ ​ File, video still, 2013 ​ Figures 15­17: Jon Rafman, 9­Eyes, 2009­2016 (ongoing) ​ ​ Figures 18­19: Hito Steyerl, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ ​ .Mov File, video stills, 2013 ​ Figures 20­21: Hito Steyerl, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ .Mov File, video stills, 2013 ​ Figure 22: Adam Harvey, Look No. 5, from the CV Dazzle series, 2010 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Figure 23: Juliana Huxtable, Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm), from the ​ ​ ​ ​ UNIVERSAL CROP TOPS FOR ALL THE SELF CANONIZED SAINTS OF BECOMING series, 2015 ​ ​ Figure 24: Trevor Paglen, Autonomy Cube, 2015 ​ ​ Figure 25: Juan Rodríguez Juárez, De Español y de India produce Mestiso, c. 1725 ​ ​

4 Figure 26: Artist Unknown, De Negro y de India produce Lobo, c. 1730 ​ ​ Figure 27: Byron Kim and Glenn Ligon, Black & White, 1993 ​ ​ Figure 28: Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Colored People Grid), 2009­10 ​ ​ Figure 29: Toyin Odutola, Uncertain, Yet Reserved, 2012 ​ ​ ​ Figure 30: William Pope.L, Skin Set Painting: Purple People are Reason Bicarbonate, ​ ​ 2011­13

Figure 31: William Pope.L, Skin Set Painting: Orange People are God when She is ​ Shitting, 2011­12 ​ Figure 32: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series), 2014 ​ ​ Figure 33: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), 2013 ​ ​ Figure 34: Screenshot of Swatches tool function from Photoshop

Figure 35: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Color Wheel, 2015 ​ ​ Figure 36: Photo by John Smith (@juansmithers), Dallas Contemporary Kindred Spirits ​ exhibition image, from Instagram

Figure 37: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Oil Colors, 2015 ​ ​

5 Introduction

Whether consciously or unconsciously, the ways in which users engage with the internet inform how they express versions of their own identities. Processes of identity production are never singular or static, but rather dynamic and adaptable. Self­making on the internet takes many forms. Conscious examples of self­making in the digital sphere include curating and posting textual content, photos, and videos on social media, the construction of email signatures, saved collections of images or music on Pinterest or Spotify, etc. There are also unconscious examples of self­making, like the cataloguing of information about who we are as consumers and as citizens. Examples of these processes include online purchases saved by advertisers and large corporations, Google searches saved by the NSA, and GPS check­ins, etc. There exists a contradictory and dualistic nature to notions of safety and agency when it comes to self­expression on the internet. For many women of color and other members of marginalized groups, interactions on the internet provide highly flexible and open spaces for experimental self­making––in some cases, digital spaces can be safer and more accessible modes for self expression than IRL (in real life). In other cases, an internet user’s assumed ​ ​ anonymity within an omnipresent surveillance state can produce digital experiences that are filtered by fear, violence, and anxiety where members of oppressed groups are more at risk for potential dangers. Some of the conceptual questions this thesis considers are:

How do artists consider this paradoxical tension between the digital space as one of potential freedom, and, at the same time, one of sinister control? How do digital images and their unreliability as they exist on the internet allow for transfiguring modes of

6 self­expression? How can manipulated, distorted, pixelated, and low­resolution images serve to subvert oppressive structures through their unreliability?

To answer this question, I argue that contemporary artists Adriana Varejão, Hito

Steyerl, and Rafia Santana use the genre of self­portraiture in their artwork to illustrate the unreliability of the image in processes of self­making in the digital age. As women artists of color, they have particular gendered and racialized interactions within digital spheres, and are consciously incorporating that subjectivity in their artworks.1

The first chapter of this thesis is on the self­portraiture of contemporary New

York­based artist Rafia Santana. She primarily uses digital photography and digital manipulation tools like Photoshop to construct glossy, colorful, highly aestheticized, and partially abstracted self­portraits, which she oftentimes calls “selfies.” In most of these selfies, her use of a glitch aesthetic––a term I will later define––functions to abstract the image in order to convey feelings of frustration, unease, and melancholy. Of Puerto

Rican descent and open about her own black identity, Santana is also an artist whose practice extends beyond the production of the self­portraits themselves. She frequently creates spaces of open engagement and networks of solidarity on her various social media profiles for other marginalized groups by voicing her concerns regarding contemporary oppressions relating to race and gender.

The second chapter of this project is dedicated to an examination of a video work by contemporary German artist Hito Steyerl. Arguably her most evocative and well­known work, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A F**king Didactic Educational .MOV File ​

1 I use this term “woman of color” lightly, as not all of these artists have publicly disclosed their own social identities, but rather choose to use the term to emphasize their outsider status, and to illustrate how some of the theory on woman spectatorship on the internet related to the works of these artists. Also, please note that the terminology I use (“women of color”) is site­specific and not universally applicable, but instead comes from my personal understandings of gender and race as a North American scholar.

7 (2013), is a quasi­didactic, satirical video that instructs its audience on “how not to be seen,” especially as participants in a digital world. Through the inclusion of her own body, Steyerl asserts her own self as unequivocally present in the work, but also insists on some of the more sinister aspects of self­making in the digital realm––the very real threats of surveillance, control, and violence. She asserts that images are unreliable, material things, which can reflect both the hypervisibility of the surveilled subject and the invisibility of the marginalized body.

Finally, the last chapter of this thesis project is about the self­portrait artworks of contemporary Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão. The works at hand are Varejão’s most recent sets of oil paintings, Polvo (2013­2014) and Kindred Spirits (2015). Specifically, ​ ​ ​ ​ my analysis begins with how Varejão calls upon the history of Latin American “casta” paintings in Polvo and Kindred Spirits by painting her own visage repeatedly with ​ ​ ​ ​ different skin tones. In both of these series, her incorporation of pixels, digital color wheels, and repetition, all indicate how the boundaries of constructed social identities––like race––are increasingly intangible in contemporary internet spaces.

Historical Context & The Unreliable Image

In the mid­to­late 1990s, a shift occurred in the history of the genre of internet art, sometimes also referred to as net.art by artists, curators, and historians. Prior to then, many artists who had been working on networked culture and the internet symbolically and physically in their works were conceptually concerned with questions of increased access, global communication structures, rapid flows of information, and the prospect of

8 a globalized economy. This was the era when essayist John Perry Barlow, writing for the

Electronic Frontier Foundation, infamously declared that cyberspace would be:

...a world that is both everywhere and nowhere [...]. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.2

Of course, it is now understood that the dynamics of oppression and discrimination do not magically disappear on the internet, but are instead reproduced in different ways. Prior to the late 1990s, many internet artists––and manifesto writers like

Barlow––had adopted celebratory tones of fascination towards the internet’s supposed platform for freedom, agency, and exchange. This mindset was short­lived and in 1998, the Austrian­based international festival Ars Electronica functioned as a catalyst for artists who began to question and complicate the supposedly free network structure for exchange of information known as the internet. Ars Electronica’s theme, titled “Infowar,” spurred an explosive series of moments in internet art history where artists began to use hacking and other interventionist strategies to critique the ways in which corporate interests and governmental control tactics affected internet user rights.3 In addition to these concerns, the economic crash of 2000 led to public disillusionment about the dot­com boom that had previously led to economic prosperity. From that moment onwards, many internet artists would begin to abandon the interface of the webpage as the primary medium for their work, and would instead begin to experiment with other

2 Barlow, John Perry. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Electronic Frontier ​ ​ Foundation. 1996. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace­independence. 3 Some artworks exemplative of these concerns at the time include Ricardo Dominguez’s collective ​ ​ intervention titled Electronic Disturbance Theater (1998) and the Swiss artist collective etoy’s ​ ​ satirical Toywar (1999­2000). ​ ​

9 media (like performance, video, animation, etc.) while continuing to engage with the internet thematically. This notion that internet art could also constitute artwork that conceptually deals with the internet as phenomenon, whilst simultaneously abandoning it as artistic medium, is a key tenet of post­internet theory, a contemporary genre that applies to the artwork chosen for analysis in this thesis project.

Most of the artists who are recognized within the genre of internet art today are ones who do not necessarily produce work on the internet, or for an internet audience.

Rather, whether or not they identify themselves as post­internet, many contemporary internet artists engage conceptually with the internet as phenomenon, through sculpture, photography, painting, performance, site­specific installation, etc. Rafia Santana,

Adriana Varejão, and Hito Steyerl are three artists who fit into this model. Santana is partially the exception to this because the digital photographs she manipulates on digital software then get shared onto her social media, where other internet users can interact with them. However, the fact that all three of these artists engage with the digital world conceptually in their artwork through the use of self­portraiture unites them in their methodology.

The theory I have developed of the unreliable image is crucial for understanding how all three artists have chosen to challenge the self­portrait’s digital manifestations, processes of identity formation and self­making, and the implicit infallibility of technological systems. First and foremost, I conceptualize the unreliable image in opposition to a reliable one––an image that is for the most part static, unchanging, and figurative, visually representative of how objects appear in the real world.4 Therefore, the unreliable image is one that is inherently dynamic, susceptible to forces beyond itself,

4 The irony in this is that figurative painting historically has not been about depictions of truth, per se, but rather about constructed discourses about power, hierarchy, religion, and government.

10 impermanent, and fallible. This is the nature of the digital image that is never reliable precisely because it can be manipulated so easily––through editing software, filters, etc.

The unreliable digital image is also vulnerable to digital glitches and corruption, considering the rapid­pace of technology and how quickly files become outdated. From the standpoint of identity, unreliable digital images allow for a certain amount of flexibility.

Through manipulation and abstraction, images like the self­portraits of Santana, Steyerl, and Varejão, can contain enough space for nuance, experimentation, and freedom.

Through a comparative analytic approach, I attempt to situate Varejão, Steyerl, and Santana within the emerging genre of internet art where they have not yet been fully recognized. This is not to essentialize and imply that all three artists share a similar subjective experience simply because they fall within similar ethnic/racial and gender categories. Rather, I want to advocate for their inclusion and recognition within the parameters of what is known as “internet art.” The work of these three artists is specific to their own experiences, but also is illuminating of the unique ways that the rigidity of social identity categories for marginalized groups can be challenged through the unreliable image. Despite what these artists have to offer in terms of their unique positionalities, the contemporary artists who are being recognized and celebrated in the current historical moment for producing artworks that engage with the internet and the digital sphere are noticeably men, mostly from the United States, Europe, and sometimes Asia.5 Although women of color all over the world are producing artwork that is thematically and sometimes conceptually similar to the works of these male artists, they are being categorically excluded in the existing scholarship and exhibition literature on internet art. This exclusion is especially unfortunate because women have paved the

5 Artists like Cory Arcangel, Jon Rafman, Artie Vierkant, Brad Troemel, Ryan Trecartin, etc.

11 way in terms of unofficial artistic and cultural production on the internet.6 This thesis considers the connections between the self­portrait as art object and expressions of self in digital spaces, the history of the genre of self­portraiture for women­identified artists, and the performativity of the production of self as it relates to potential audiences and imagined communities.

6 On Tumblr, for example, a social networking site that has a blog­style format, many women, queer women, and women of color compose the majority of the contributors, producing much of the creative content present on the site.

12 I

Melancholy, Glitch, and Power: Rafia Santana’s Subversive Selfies

Introduction

In 2015, New York based contemporary artist Rafia Santana had a solo exhibition at the Museum of African Diasporic Arts in Brooklyn, NY. The show, entitled

“SELFiE,” displayed the artist’s own manipulated self portraits, highly stylized in their vibrant use of color and their glossy, seamless designs. Most of the self­portraits created by Santana, whether they exist only on the artist’s own social media pages or whether they were chosen by arts institutions to show in more formal settings, all relay senses of unease to the viewer. Intentionally using the language of the “selfie,” perhaps to comment on the pressures of performing identity in digital spheres through avatars, icons, and profile pictures, Santana’s work exists at the intersection between adamant self­making and pained self­care. Her direct interaction with other users in various internet spaces like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook exemplifies how performative self­making on the internet can be a cathartic release of self to an engaged digital public.

Through her use of fragmentation and glitch in Photoshop, Santana manipulates her own image to convey feelings of melancholy, while also subverting the viewer’s assumptions about the typical selfie, thus challenging the potential for the voyeuristic gaze. Santana’s images fit into a legacy of feminist self­making and social critique; her self­portraits––along with her digital presence on social networks––embody some of the crucial tenets of Third World feminism like intersectionality and radical autonomy.

13 Like the other artists who will be the focus of this thesis, Adriana Varejão and

Hito Steyerl, Rafia Santana questions the image’s validity as purely image. By using glitch as an element of disorientation, she presents a self­portrait that indicates frustrated anxiety and melancholy. The unreliable image disorients in order to convey hidden truths.

On Historical Expressions of Melancholy in Women’s Self­Portraits

Rafia Santana’s visual explorations of her own identities fall into a rich tradition of female self­portraiture in modern and contemporary art.7 More specifically, Santana’s use of self­portraiture as an expression of an ingrained and uneasy melancholy has also been thematically explored by female artists within the art­historical canon. Immediately historic figures like Carrie Mae Weems, Frida Kahlo, Yolanda López, and Ana Mendieta come to mind, but also lesser known contemporary artists like Firelei Báez and Juliana

Huxtable, for example, use self­portraiture to comment on palpably felt contemporary social oppressions.

Using digital drawing tablets, digital photography, and Photoshop as her primary artistic media, Santana is able to inject her self­portraiture with some recognizable elements of digital production. Historically, artists such as those mentioned above have used media like analog photography, painting, and performance to express some of the same concerns that Santana references on a daily basis through her artworks and in her social media spheres. Much like Santana’s use of the selfie to highlight some of the

7 Specifically, I am thinking of artists such as Nan Goldin, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Yolanda López, Frida Kahlo, and Ana Mendieta.

14 anxieties that come with her social positionality, Kahlo, Weems, and Mendieta all use the intimacy of self­portraiture to critique larger, structural systems of oppression.

Frida Kahlo’s most well­recognized works are her self­portraits on canvas from the first half of the twentieth century, first while she was in Mexico and later on in the

United States. Although now co­opted into an highly commodified global aesthetic, her self­portraits symbolize both a fierce and deliberate feminism as well as a deeply palpable melancholy. Her commitment to pushing the boundaries of gender and critiquing Western imperialism through self­portraiture is exemplative of this dynamic dualism. In El Venado Herido (fig. 1), for example, Kahlo depicts herself as a small deer ​ ​ pierced by arrows. Bleeding from her wounds while maintaining an ambiguously stoic face, the Kahlo represented in the portrait is calm despite the pain caused by such forceful violence enacted unto the deer’s body. Another work, La Columna Rota (fig. 2), ​ ​ also reflects the suffering that Kahlo endured throughout her life, specifically her childhood polio and the injuries she suffered at 18 when a trolley collided with the bus she was travelling in. Metaphorically, the artwork reflects on how systems have failed her––like her spinal brace, the traditional ideals surrounding gendered beauty and femininity have not suited her and instead, they are replaced by frustration. Other personal narratives of pain like multiple miscarriages, chronic illness, as well as moments of debilitating heartbreak are chronicled in the published version of her journal,

The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self­Portrait. Despite her status as a contemporary ​ icon of feminist strength, Kahlo’s artworks are deeply infused with melancholy, pain, and suffering. They complicate the belief that strength and sorrow are oppositional notions, and instead dissolve the imagined boundary between both states of being.

15 African­American contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems’s primary medium is photography, and through her subjects as well as through varying photographic techniques, she is able to complicate notions of gendered and racial hierarchies.

Weems’s photographs from the Kitchen Table Series (fig. 3­6) function similarly to ​ ​ Santana’s self­portraits when considering themes of resilience and painful sorrow. In this series of black­and­white photographs, Weems photographs herself as she negotiates her own identity amongst family and friends and in different domestic social settings.

There are moments of disconcerting pain and frustration, which can be easily picked up by the viewer, like when Weems cradles her own body in a fetal position with a bottle of wine at her side in one photograph, and in another photograph, when she is crying and being comforted by two other female subjects. In the same series, however, there are also moments of celebratory strength, like when Weems assertively stands behind the kitchen table, both hands on its wooden surface, and confronts the viewer’s gaze with her own, or, in another photograph, when her naked body is positioned in such a way that implies she is pleasuring her own body. Like Kahlo’s self­portraits, Weems suggests that the female body, in her case an implicitly racialized one, is unavoidably pained and yet embodies power.

Perhaps the most conceptual in her use of the silhouette as gestural self­portraiture when compared to the previously mentioned artists, Cuban artist Ana

Mendieta invokes tragedy and pain while pointing to the ephemeral nature of life. The impact and importance of Ana Mendieta’s artwork is often overshadowed by the drama and controversy surrounding her death––some believe it was a drunken accident, some believe it was a suicide, and others a murder by her partner at the time, minimalist artist

Carl Andre. Also idolized as a feminist icon by many, Mendieta began her famous

16 Silueta Series (fig. 7­9) in the early 1970s, an era formerly dominated by male artists ​ belonging to the Land Art movement. In her Silueta Series, Mendieta stages ​ ​ performances that become the main aspects of her photography. Submerged in dirt, sand, mud, and water, each photograph displays the artist’s silhouette imprinted within a natural landscape, or the artist’s body covered by the natural landscape. Photographs from the series reveal a haunting, deeply emotive aesthetic, simultaneously evoking divergent visions of birth and death, as well as pain and joy. Like the works of Kahlo and

Weems, Mendieta composes works that ground her spirit and body to the earth in a way that indicates fortitude and conviction, while also using her silhouette to symbolize absence and sorrow.

Although Rafia Santana’s selfie images clearly fit into this specific art­historical trajectory of a feminist artistic self­making, through both melancholy and power, it is important to note that Santana’s self­portraiture has the most in common with the artwork of someone like Juliana Huxtable, because of the way both artists extend their artistic practices to their digital networks. Both Juliana Huxtable and Rafia Santana use

Photoshop to alter their own images, producing a similar visual aesthetic of bold color, glossy design, and uncanny landscape (fig.10). But they also engage with similar digital communities through Tumblr and Twitter, because of their shared social identities and their presence in New York’s contemporary art world.8 Today’s self­portrait is more than just the digital image that is representative of the artist’s own physical body––the

8 These two platforms, Tumblr and Twitter, are online social networking sites where users can engage with others by sharing content as well as interacting through sent text, images, and photos. Both sites are different in format. Tumblr is set­up and used more like a blog, where users for the most part are uncensored and unlimited in the amount of content they can post and share. Twitter, on the other hand, limits users to posts of 140 characters or less, but still allows for the sharing of photo and video. I mention the importance of these two platforms in relation to the work of Santana and Huxtable because of the pressures young contemporary artists face in a hyper­competitive art market where promotional self­branding is ubiquitous.

17 self­portrait is also the digital presence, the text and images that the artist publishes across digital social networks that are performative extensions of self.

Rafia Santana, Glitch, and the Subversive Digital Self­Portrait

The self­portrait works of Rafia Santana embody the perfectionist, bold, and glossy aesthetics of the Photoshop/selfie Millennial generation. At the same time, they also reveal a vulnerability of the subject through glitch abstraction, as well as subject matter that implies exhaustion and frustration. Much like many of the self­portraits that populate social networks today, Santana’s selfies reflect a commitment to the digital manipulation of the image, which I argue is a direct expression of a sense of agency in the artist’s own self­representation.

In Tired (fig.11), one sees Santana’s own body, stretched horizontally across a ​ ​ leather sofa. In the image Santana is topless, exposing most of her naked body, and facing downward, whilst shielding her face with her forearm. The image evokes an unsettling discomfort with her limited exposure to the viewer. The act of obscuring the subject’s own face while laying down suggests feelings of exhaustion, embarrassment, and defeat, even though the facial expressions and features are not visible. In the image, Santana has also manipulated her legs to be contorted in an anatomically impossible way, with one leg visibly longer than the other, further adding to the eerie and uncanny atmosphere of the photograph. The addition of an extra calf and knee, as well as the contorted positioning of her body on the furniture, encourages a viewership that is both unsettled by the image and also drawn in by curiosity. Santana’s posture on the elegant leather sofa in a darkened room immediately conjures up scenes of the famous

18 art­historical reclining female nude, except in Santana’s case, her body reveals a tense anxiety, subverting the assumed pleasure in the viewer’s gaze.

Another digitally manipulated photograph by Santana, Worked (fig. 12), functions ​ ​ similarly in the use of abstraction implemented on the artist’s legs, of which there are three and also contorted to a point of absurdity. Although she partially hides her face from the viewer with her hand, in the image Santana meets the viewer’s gaze directly, and her expression suggests boredom, weariness, and perhaps even a stoic jadedness, as if she is already accustomed to the predatory gaze of the viewer. She is standing in a pose that is both sexually suggestive, while also leaning in a way that feels tired and restful, embodying that recurring tension between vulnerability and strength. The title of the piece, Worked, is explicit in the connotations it suggests about domesticity and sex. ​ ​ In conjunction with the distorted apron that Santana dons on her naked body, the image signals the exhaustion felt considering how domestic labor and sex can be physically and emotionally exhausting tasks in an oppressive context.

In the final image of this analysis, Very Little Sleep (fig. 13), Santana also ​ ​ employs glitch­like abstraction to the photographic image of her face. The vivid red color from her lips is stretched and displaced so that one of her eyes takes on a grotesque bloodshot quality. Like its title suggests, the image portrays the artist’s face in a kind of sleepless, hallucinatory delirium. Santana displays the finished artwork with the

Photoshop transparency grid in the background, which is usually removed before the finished image product is displayed. She draws attention to the image as image, as unable to be removed from the setting of its manipulation. And the result is deeply unsettling: the head is floating, color is injected into the facial features in haphazard ways, suggesting the weary expression of an anxious subject who gets “very little sleep.”

19 All three of these works use abstraction methodologically––what Santana calls

“digital manipulation”––in order to represent a self that is fragmented. The nature of each of these images is that they are obviously digital, and because Santana has labeled them as selfies, both on her Tumblr and in previous exhibition text, they subvert the typical aesthetic associations with the selfie in the digital age.9 Since the images can be easily read as digital, and since the assumption is that the selfie should usually represent stylized, mechanized perfection, then it makes sense that these selfies are immediately discomforting to the viewer. The use of abstraction reads as an unintentional glitch, even though these elements are actually intentional stylistic choices of the artist herself. In defining the digital glitch, artist and art theorist Iman Moradi writes:

The visual glitch is an artifact resulting from an error. It is neither the cause, nor the error itself, it is simply the product of an error and more specifically its visual manifestation. It is a significant slip that marks a departure from our expected result. [...] Visual glitches are quite often fleeting artifacts that momentarily offer a glimpse into the inner workings and complexities of storage, display, and communication technology. In doing so, they sometimes become an unintentional feedback mechanism, a last chance for us to know that technology has malfunctioned.10

As an artist who is immersed in the language and aesthetics of visual technology,

Santana infuses her portraits with the error, albeit in a very deliberate way. Her portraits signify a process that seems to have gone awry, and its visual manifestation on her depicted body is both disconcerting and yet simultaneously, grotesquely appealing. Her selfies read very differently than the stylized perfection of the digital images seen on the internet for advertising and personal branding, as they reflect some of the more unsettling nuances concerning the pressures of self­making in the digital age.

9 I mean to suggest that they are “obviously digital,” when image quality and color is visually contrasted with analog photography. 10 Moradi, Iman. Glitch: Designing Imperfection. (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2009), 8. ​ ​

20 Considering this tension between the digital error and mechanized flawlessness,

Moradi also states that “we currently live in machine­inspired human cultures of perfection, where the clarity of a signal becomes a marketable asset or bankable commodity, and in which static, undesirable detritus and failure are not usually options.”

11 So, when a digital artist like Santana highlights the error, and intentionally incorporates what is usually seen as failure in a self­portrait, she is revealing both personal and cultural malaises and neuroses associated with self­making in the digital moment. She returns to the almost nostalgic affirmation of failure as unequivocal human truth. Of course there is melancholy in this assertion, but perhaps more importantly, there is also liberating strength.

On Selfie Culture, Self­Making in Digital Communities, and Self­Care through Social

Media

If selfies are the internet user’s response to an impulse to self­express amongst various digital communities, then Rafia Santana’s self­portraits undeniably display a deeply emotive vulnerability, which can be read as moments of cathartic release, attempts in self­care, or a divulging of personal trauma felt by the artist. In Jill Walker

Rettberg’s book, How We See Ourselves Through Technology, she writes that “the serial ​ ​ nature of most digital self­representation is closely connected to the tradition of the diary, which is written bit by bit over a period of time.”12 It is essential to reiterate here that

Santana’s selfies, although they are independent artworks and should be recognized as

11 Moradi, Iman. Glitch: Designing Imperfection. (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2009), 9. ​ ​ 12 Rettberg, Jill W. Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and ​ Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), 44. ​

21 such, are also serial works that the artist posts on her various social media, to a following of about 1,000 users.13 The selfies work as visual complements to the other content posted by Santana on these social networks. While Santana uses Tumblr as a platform for sharing artistic content as well as reviews and articles written about her artwork, her Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are platforms that she uses to share personal viewpoints, frustrations, and traumas.14

Apparent in both Santana’s digital presence and in her self­portraits is a very intentional assertion of her various social identities, the ways in which they intersect, and how oppressive societal forces manifest themselves through certain lived experiences.

The concept of intersectionality is embedded in Santana’s artworks as well as in her exchanges with others within internet spaces, and many of the seemingly contradictory tensions that emerge from her artistic practice evoke the concerns of postcolonial feminist theorists like Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa. Postcolonial or Third World feminists emerged from a radical desire to incorporate women of various intersecting identities into an inclusive, yet radical vision. Prior to the emergence of these thinkers, first wave feminism prioritized the concerns of predominantly white, middle­class, and straight women. Postcolonial feminism served as a critique of the white hegemonic structures that were perpetuated by first wave feminists, and also worked to validate and affirm the unique experiences of women of color living within a patriarchal and racist society. This second goal is essential in the analysis of Santana’s use of glitch and

13 Rafia Santana has around 1,000 followers on Instagram. Data on her followers on Tumblr was publicly unavailable. 14 A quick look at Santana’s Tumblr page reveals that her content is mostly limited to artwork she has produced and its reception in the art world. In August of 2015, she posted on Tumblr: “I wonder how many followers I would lose if I just started personal blogging on here…” (Santana). It would be interesting, when further developing this project at a later point in time, to consider why Santana feels it more appropriate to share personal narratives on certain social network platforms and not others. Why is Tumblr singular as a medium for the sharing of artwork and other professional content?

22 evocation of suffering––affirming the very real, felt experiences of subjects whose voices are continuously negated.

In many ways, the frustration present in Santana’s self­portraits mimics the kind of exasperation released by Third World feminists in their writings seeking self­care and affirmation. In Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Anger,” published in Sister Outsider, she states: “My response to racism is anger. I have lived ​ ​ with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight.”15 Much like the conflicted feelings present in the bodily expressions of Santana’s self­portrait works,

Lorde’s understanding of her own anger is also a nuanced internalized feeling, but a response to her own lived experience. Similar in tone and in intention, Chicana feminist

Gloria Anzáldua has written: “I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to ​ staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.”16 Although ​ Anzaldúa is specifically referring to patriarchal values that oppress both Chicano women and men, she is undeniably holding onto a similar frustration to that of Lorde and

Santana. It is the experience of a shared societal unbelonging, and the pained angst that comes along from the accumulation of lived experiences in an oppressive world.

Santana visually infuses this perspective into the discomfort of her abstracted self­portraits, but she also uses language to communicate with women and communities of color on the internet about shared experiences, opinions, frustrations, and hopes.

Much of the commentary Santana shares on her social media has to do with how oppressive forces affect her daily life as a young, black, female artist––and like many

15 Lorde, Audre. "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." Sister Outsider: Essays and ​ ​ Speeches. (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984), 124. ​ 16 Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), ​ ​ ​ 22.

23 other young women of color on the internet, she chooses to share deeply personal narratives as a way to connect with others who share similar experiences. In March of

2016, Santana posted on her Twitter: “I want to like men more but they’re always dismissing me & patronizing me and giving me reasons to fear for my life.”17 When she shared a screenshot of this same post on her Instagram, another user commented

“Thanks for bringing awareness and fighting to make these conversations happen, if we ​ don't talk abt [sic] it, nothing will ever change.”18 In another moment of interaction,

Santana shared another user’s post on her own Facebook page, which stated: “Black women can reclaim their sexuality however they’d like. But the rest of y’all can stop sexualizing us. [...] We don’t need to be sexualized to be accepted. We don’t need to be physically appealing to black men, white people or anyone else to be given an ounce of legitimacy or humanity.”19 These two examples of interactivity between Santana and other users on various social media are situations in which although the content relates to moments of sadness, trauma, and felt oppressions, users––along with the artist herself––are able to connect and gain strength and solidarity through shared experiences. Again, these posts are not isolated, but rather are incorporated into how

Santana continually engages in self­making in digital spaces. Santana’s moments of shared personal narrative are just as revealing as the visual self­portraits she produces and shares.

This phenomenon is not unique to Rafia Santana. Interestingly enough, there are also entire internet­based digital communities of women of color who engage in these

17 Rafia Santana’s Twitter page, accessed March 10, 2016, https://twitter.com/raf_i_a. ​ ​ 18 @tang_fang, comment on Rafia Santana’s Instagram page, March 11, 2016, accessed March 12, 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BCyqScKsHUJ/?taken­by=raf_i_a. ​ ​ 19 Coleman, Rafia Santana’s Facebook page, accessed March 11, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/rafia.santana?fref=ts. ​

24 similar processes of self­care and solidarity through sharing and connection. These social sites of connection on the internet evoke what Communication scholar Lisa

Nakamura has coined as “cybertyping”:

...the process by which computer/human interfaces, the dynamics and economics of access, and the means by which users are able to express themselves online interacts with the ‘cultural layer’ or ideologies regarding race that they bring with them into cyberspace.20

Nakamura’s emphasis, in other words, is that personal ideologies and identities are brought into cyberspace in different ways, and they vary depending on how internet users choose to engage with others in digital spaces, as well as what digital social spaces they choose to occupy. The Art Hoe Collective, for example––a group of young curators of color––receives, selects, and shares the artworks of other artists of color on their Instagram. One of the founders of the collective, Cassandra T, has asserted that their digital space is meant to be “easily accessible and it immediately gives artists a platform to showcase their work worldwide, [...] it could possibly mean opportunities

[artists] wouldn’t otherwise get because of how rigid and oppressive the mainstream art world is."21 Another Instagram page, Veteranas and Rucas, run by Guadalupe Rosales, a Chicana­identifying artist originally from East L.A., serves as an archive of photographs from L.A. Chicano communities of the 1990s. Rosales curates the Instagram account of photograph submissions from other users, and recently explained in an interview that

“[she] started posting photographs or images [she] felt were really empowering, with some history or background, and it grew because people noticed it. People felt that they

20 Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. (New York: ​ ​ ​ Routledge, 2002), 3. 21 Sargent, Antwaun. "Can The “Art Hoe" Movement Change Contemporary Art?" The Creators ​ Project, September 12, 2015. Accessed March 15, 2016. ​ http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/can­the­art­hoe­movement­change­contemporary­art.

25 could relate to it.”22 Lastly, a collective of Tijuana­based women called Sad Girls y Qué has most in common to the aesthetics of melancholy and frustration that Rafia Santana infuses in her self­portraiture. Alluding to the Chicana “sad girl” concept introduced in the

1994 film Mi Vida Loca, Sad Girls y Qué often include the imagery of the aestheticized ​ ​ Chicana “chola” of 1990s East Los Angeles. Emerging arts writer Barbara Calderón has written that the “sad girl is often depicted in LA tattoo art as a gangster chick with tears running down her face. She's beautiful with a hard­edged pachuca style. However, this ​ ​ image of a crying woman is not a weak victim. She's tough and conveys a more complex range of femininity.”23 This complexity––reflecting a vulnerable, melancholic, self­exposure whilst simultaneously conveying strength and power––is absolutely crucial in my analysis of Santana’s artistic practice.

Much like the previously discussed digital communities, Rafia Santana is facilitating multiple digital spaces of encounter on her various social media pages, and actively engaging with similar politics of self­making and expression. The emergence and proliferation of these gendered, racialized, and ethnic­specific digital spaces might have to do with the absence and unavailability of spaces dedicated to these particular marginalized groups in the public sphere––specifically, spaces that transcend physical locality. Through her unsettling self­portraits and through her extended artistic practice of narrative­based self­making, Santana carves out a digital space for the presentation of a nuanced, and ultimately deeply human, self.

22 Gutiérrez, Raquel. "Veteranas and Rucas: Documenting 1990s Chicano Youth Culture." KCET, ​ ​ February 5, 2016. Accessed March 15, 2016. https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/photos­of­east­la­in­the­1990s. 23 Calderón­Douglass, Barbara. "Sad Girls Y Qué Are Breaking Down Machismo with Internet Art." Vice, October 24, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2016. ​ http://www.vice.com/read/sad­girls­y­que­is­breaking­down­machismo­and­offering­an­alternative­to ­white­feminism­456.

26 Conclusion

Reflecting on glitch and its potentiality for both failure and liberation, American poet and interdisciplinary scholar Laura Mullen has written:

the fear of breaking up [in this case referring to the distortion of glitch] might be gradually replaced by something like an understanding of our brokenness: a sort of undulant surface tension tugged at by both the will to present some success and an increasing desire to inhabit and explore the spaces opened by a failure not quite not quite not quite complete.24

In this passage Mullen identifies a key concept present in Santana’s use of glitch as methodology––the simultaneously present desires to embody success as well as failure.

Santana’s selfies are subversive because they challenge the mechanized, glossy perfection associated with the selfie as representative self­portrait. Through the inclusion of the glitch as intentional aesthetic, Santana is able to convey feelings of disorientation and unease. The aesthetic of the error is unsettling in her images, and revealing of anxieties, frustrations, and neuroses that infect the process on the digital canvas. Her use of glitch in the self­portrait becomes a disruptive force––almost nostalgic for an era where digitized perfection was not always the norm.

As an extension of moments of self­making that can be seen on Santana’s social media, her visual self­portraits express the seemingly dualistic tensions of palpable frustration and fiercely defiant power.

24 Mullen, Laura. "Glitch." BOMB Magazine 107 (2009): 25. Web. 1 Apr. 2016. ​ ​ ​

27 II

Digital Self­Making, Agency, and Surveillance Anxiety: The Post­Internet Image in

the Work of Hito Steyerl

Introduction

Since the early 2000s, artists who have engaged with the internet conceptually have also been concerned with issues of privacy, security, and surveillance.

Contemporary video artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl began working in 2004.25 Steyerl’s early works are marked by her interest in international feminisms as well as issues of memory and politics.26 In 2013, however, the video work that propelled Steyerl into the realm of international popularity was undeniably HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking ​ Didactic Educational .MOV File.27 A 16­minute video instructing its audience on “how not ​ to be seen,” the work uses humor and absurdist elements in order to compel its viewers to question how images are generated, how they circulate, and what they can reveal about stereotypes, national governmental bodies, and capitalist structures. Divided neatly into four sections (or instructional “steps”), the video’s formulaic organization contrasts jarringly with the violent and chaotic reality it is exposing. The alarming themes of hyper­surveillance and authoritarian control emerge as critical elements of negotiation for the subjects present throughout the video.

25 This is according to the two galleries that represent her, KOW Berlin, and Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York). Further investigation on the rest of the works in her oeuvre is pending. 26 In Hito Steyerl’s 2004 video November (https://vimeo.com/88484604), for example, her friend is ​ ​ ​ ​ depicted leading a revolutionary liberation movement, training an army of female guerilla fighters, and as a self­described “attractive woman.” 27 Rhizome, MoMA, Artnet, Artforum, and DIS Magazine have all published reviews and commentary on this particular video by Hito Steyerl after its debut at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Additionally, the work was acquired by MoMA in 2014.

28 HOW NOT TO BE SEEN was shown for the first time at the Venice Biennale of ​ 2013.28 Coincidentally, that was the very same summer that Edward Snowden’s revelations about the reach of mass surveillance in the United States––specifically, the revelation of the National Security Agency’s spying on potential terrorist threats, as well as all U.S. civilians and other national leaders globally––shocked a worldwide public.

Interestingly, when the work was first shown at the Biennale, a writer for Rhizome stated ​ ​ that “[the work was] installed at the far back corner of the Giardino delle Vergini behind ​ the Arsenale; to reach it, Steyerl joked, one must swim two canals and climb a wall,” ​ which is unfortunate considering its relevance to the events occurring at the time concerning privacy and surveillance.29 The video work’s darker, underlying messages about a surveilled dystopia would have resounded with the 2013 biennale public.

Despite the biennale curators’ initial oversight, since then, Steyerl’s work has come to symbolize a shift in the international contemporary internet art scene, and recognition of her efforts culminated in the acquisition of HOW NOT TO BE SEEN by MoMA in 2014 as ​ ​ well as Steyerl being awarded the EYE Prize in 2015.30

Usually identified within the genre of post­internet art, Steyerl’s work belongs to a generation of contemporary artists who identify and discuss digital surveillance, privacy, and image circulation in their artistic practices.31 Post­internet artists are concerned with issues that relate to the internet as an integral aspect of daily life. In a 2011 essay,

28 For this chapter I will refer to the video work as HOW NOT TO BE SEEN, as shorthand for the ​ ​ longer title. 29 Connor, Michael. "Hito Steyerl's 'How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File'" Rhizome Blog (blog), May 31, 2013. ​ http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/31/hito­steyerl­how­not­to­be­seen/. 30 The EYE Prize is “a £25,000 prize [that] was established by the Amsterdam film museum of the ​ same name with the goal of supporting outstanding artists who work primarily in film.” (Ghorashi 2015). http://www.artnews.com/2015/04/02/hito­steyerl­wins­the­first­eye­prize/ ​ 31 Some examples of relevant artists are Trevor Paglen, Artie Vierkant, Ryan Trecartin, Aram Bartholl, and Juliana Huxtable, among others.

29 contemporary artist Marisa Olson offers commentary on how she understands post­internet, both as visual material culture as well as explicit to artistic production. She states: “The notion of the post­internet encapsulates and transports conditions and their critical awareness, even so far as to transcend the internet. [...] Indeed, the impact of the internet reaches far beyond art [that deals with the internet], and far beyond art itself, to all the exigencies and banalities of life in network culture.”32 In Olson’s interpretation of post­internet, she identifies a contemporary phenomenon where the “everyday banalities of life” are already so entrenched in the digital that, consequently, the influence of the internet and the digital is omnipresent and goes unnoticed. Additionally, in her essay, she explains that some post­internet artists who produce work related to the internet’s influence in society, go beyond explicitly referencing the internet in their work, and avoid using it as an artistic medium.

Olson’s interpretation offers a critical theoretical vantage point from which to understand Steyerl’s HOW NOT TO BE SEEN and situate it within a larger conversation ​ ​ occurring between contemporary artists and their work. Like many of the works of her artistic contemporaries, Steyerl’s video work discusses the internet’s supposed usage as a vehicle for freedom and access, while also warning its users of the negative repercussions of surveillance and control. Perhaps the latter message is more pronounced and dire than the former in HOW NOT TO BE SEEN, but both messages ​ ​ remain clear. A nuanced and complementary opposition informs the argument of this essay: in understanding Steyerl’s HOW NOT TO BE SEEN as post­internet, the ominous tone of the work’s satire reflects a dualistic tension between the anxieties of a surveilled

32 Olson, Marisa. "Postinternet: Art After the Internet." In Art and the Internet, 212­15. London: Black ​ ​ Dog Publishing, 2013.

30 subject on the internet and the potential for fluid and freeing self­making in digital spaces.

The Unreliable Image in a Digital World: Surveillance and Fluid Selves

The unreliable image, as imagined in this essay, is the image that embodies a shifting self, the image that is continuously tampered with, whether it be by the image’s subject, by the image’s creator, or by the image’s viewer. In HOW NOT TO BE SEEN, ​ ​ Steyerl’s bodies and subjects, which are inherently images, straddle the line between invisibility and hypervisibility. The tensions between the subject who is hypervisible in a surveillance state and the subject who is invisible because of their social positionality and circumstance contribute to the work’s larger message about the competing notions of selfhood in the digital age. Through our interactions on the internet, we are hypervisible subjects in a state of mass surveillance––this occurs even if our lived social identities afford us invisibility because of how social oppressions work to invisibilize the

“other.”

First and foremost, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN establishes that images are ​ ​ unreliable. In the first section of the video work, titled Four Ways to Make Something ​ Invisible for a Camera, a monotone, mechanized voice ominously narrates the four ​ steps: “to hide, to remove, to go off screen, to disappear.” A black­and­white resolution target, used as a meter for resolution targeting of cameras, stands in front of a green­screen chromakey background. The standing object is obscured by the artist’s hand and later removed from the viewer’s plane of sight by the artist. At the end of the section, the resolution target obscures the artist’s face and is later applied to a pixelated

31 aerial view of the globe, while the same voice states: “This is a resolution target. It measures the resolution of the world as a picture. Resolution determines visibility.

Whatever is not captured by resolution is invisible.” (fig. 14) Immediately, the idea of measuring the world creates a sense of anxiety due to the seeming impossibility and enormity of the task, and yet, the aerial view of the globe, concretizes the troubling feeling that the world is already captured through surveillance. No part of the world evades “measurement.” The Google Earth aerial view present in HOW NOT TO BE ​ SEEN refers to art works produced by some of Steyerl’s contemporaries, like Jon ​ Rafman and Aram Bartholl, for example.

In Rafman’s 9­Eyes (2009­2015) series, he appropriates stills from Google Street ​ ​ View, highlighting uncanny images of people and situations that are remnants from photographs intended only to measure, categorize, and colonize. Rafman is intentional about retaining the elements of blur and pixelation that are inherent to the robotic eye of the camera, and in doing so, his works exacerbate the tension between the neutral, documented landscape and the voyeuristic gaze of the omnipresent surveillance system.

The images he appropriates, despite the apparent precision and focus of the camera, never sit quite right––in many cases, perspective is off, the subjects resist direct representation, and consequently the images appear surreal (fig. 15­17).

Both Rafman’s and Steyerl’s emphases on image resolution and the relentless gaze indicts a global system that attempts to colonize the geographies of the globe through surveillance for the sake of accumulation of information and control. Both artists’ reliance on image quality, and their insistence on pixelation and glitch, is telling of their positions on the matter. Aesthetic manifestations of error––like a glitch, the jam, noise,

32 and arguably, low resolution––are described by Tim Barker in his essay “Aesthetics of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant” as: ​ ​ software [that] may articulate a link to the field of potential–– in this case a field of potential errors––in order to generate unforeseen, and perhaps unwanted, information. [...] We can think of the error as just this potential that may or may not become actualized. The system that seeks the actualization of unforeseen potential is also a system that has the capacity to become errant; it is a system that is surrounded by a cloud of potential errors.33

What is most revealing about this passage in relation to the works of both Steyerl and

Rafman is the notion of the errant, fallible system. Both the 9­Eyes project and HOW ​ ​ ​ NOT TO BE SEEN ground images as unreliable, even the images generated through the ​ supposedly errorless system of surveillance that strives for completeness and perfection.

34 Even Steyerl’s inclusion of the U.S. Air Force’s dilapidated, decaying, and outdated resolution targets within the “California desert” indicates that state tools for measurement used to calibrate aerial photographs and videos of the landscape are still susceptible to the forces of nature, time, and the rapid changes of technology (fig. 18­19).

In addition to the analysis of the physical remnants of the futile exercise in surveillance precision, it is productive to consider how Steyerl herself conceptualizes the glitch. She states:

The bruises of the images are its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers. Images are violated, ripped apart, subjected to interrogation and probing. They are stolen, cropped, edited, and re­appropriated. They are bought, sold, leased. Manipulated and adulated. Reviled and revered. To participate in the image means to take part in all of this.”35

33 Barker, Tim. "Aesthetic of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant." Edited by Mark Nunes. In Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures, 42­58. (New York: ​ ​ Continuum, 2011), 45. 34 Another project that considers Google’s omnipresent mapping of the world is Aram Bartholl’s Map ​ (2006­2013). Additionally, very similar in concept and methodology to Jon Rafman’s project 9­Eyes ​ (2009­2015), is Clement Valla’s Postcards from Google Earth (2011­2013). ​ ​ 35 Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 53. ​ ​ ​

33

From Steyerl’s viewpoint, system errors such as like glitches are not just revealing of an inherently fallible and imperfect system, but are also the products of processes of image circulation in digital space. The tone and use of language throughout her essay implies the violence of a transaction that is never equal or horizontal, and emphasizes how violence is manifested within the image itself. Images, hypervisible within the sophisticated––yet fallible––surveillance apparatus, are also reflections of violence.

Despite its dark message, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN also implements a certain ​ ​ level of the artist’s agency through satire, and through the didactic format of the how­to instructional video. In “Lesson III” of the video work, titled How to Be Invisible by ​ Becoming a Picture, Steyerl herself confronts the viewer by staring directly into the ​ camera, meeting the viewer’s gaze with her deadpan, unwavering presence. While standing in front of the same chromakey green screen that resurges throughout the video work, Steyerl applies green paint to her face in order to “blend in” with, or become, ​ ​ the background image (fig. 20­21). This action is symbolic in three different ways. The act of “blending in” can be a form of concealment, indicative of the urge to hide in a world where one is constantly under the threat of surveillance. Alternatively, this same action is one of self­making and agency, the impulse of the artist’s own hand in manipulating her own image under her own terms. And finally, commenting on the demeaning nature of social oppressions, Steyerl applies the invisibilizing paint to her face whilst wearing a traditional Japanese kimono, reminding the viewer of the highly sexualized, whitened caricature of the Japanese geisha.36

36 In section 4 of the video, a narrator explaining “how to become invisible by disappearing,” tells the viewer to “be female and over 50.”

34 Specifically using her face “to conceal, to mask, to be painted, to disguise,”

Steyerl positions herself as a rebel who attempts to exert her own will by refusing to be seen through various tactics. This action recalls a surveillance tactic that while pervasive and omnipresent in most people’s daily lives, can still incite a lot of fear. Facial recognition software captures images of people’s faces and later uses algorithms to analyze the images as data. While military and state institutions use facial recognition techniques as warfare and control tactics, social media and internet browsers use the same techniques to collect and sell data about users. Steyerl’s act of camouflage in

HOW NOT TO BE SEEN raises concerns about privacy and the threat of surveillance ​ happening continuously in both public and private spaces and highlights the fear that our faces can be watched, categorized, and sorted as metadata.

These concerns are not unique to the artwork of Hito Steyerl. Contemporary artist

Adam Harvey’s project titled CV Dazzle (2010­2012) is a collection of makeup and ​ ​ fashion looks that confuse facial recognition algorithms, making human faces unrecognizable to digital surveillance technology (fig. 22). This work, along with HOW ​ NOT TO BE SEEN, comments on the hypervisibility of the surveilled subject, who ​ ordinarily cannot escape the watchful radar of the global surveillance state. Both works provide alternatives to avoid detection, and although these alternatives are not necessarily practically useful, their symbolic commentary is politically resonant in the contemporary moment.

Steyerl’s face, subjected to the artist’s own manipulation, also reflects how contemporary artists––net.artists and post­internet artists alike––have been interested in the very fluid processes of self­making in digital spaces. Artists like Juliana Huxtable and

Rafia Santana, who both use Photoshop and other image manipulation software to

35 express alternative versions of themselves, illuminate how fluid identities are exacerbated through internet self­expression (fig. 23). Their artworks, much like Section

III of HOW NOT TO BE SEEN, are iterations of digital reinvention: selves are multiple, ​ ​ ever­fluid, changing, rhizomatic and arguably, hyperreal.37 Here again exists this underlying tension: while self­making on the internet might allow for more fluidity, bodies are still being surveilled and categorized as data. In the introduction to her book Our ​ Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (2011), ​ Kelly Gates writes that:

...we now have new ways of identifying ourselves, and being identified that did not exist before, and there is an increasing quantity of instances where we are required to establish our identities definitively so that our status or level of access can be determined, and information about those transactions can be recorded, with all that data in turn becoming part of our identities. Identity is now understood as a disembodied aggregate of data, a digital representation of the person constructed over time and space based on the perpetual collection of more data.38

This understanding of identity production is key when thinking about how digital productions of self in the contemporary moment are not just representational, but rather, images are material, and constitute identity formation and expression.

Despite the satirically didactic nature of Steyerl’s masking and concealment for the sake of “invisibility” in a hypervisible world, some of the how­to’s included in HOW ​ NOT TO BE SEEN reflect feelings of absurdity and impossible invention, indicative of a ​ subject’s position of anxiety and nervousness. They are the negotiations of a surveilled subject who is being watched and anxiously brainstorms a plethora of desperate ways to

37 Other related works include the early video performances of Guillermo Gómez­Peña and La Pocha Nostra, as well as the video works of Ryan Trecartin. 38 From Gates, Kelly. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of ​ ​ Surveillance. (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 17. ​

36 evade detection. A recent work by Trevor Paglen, titled Autonomy Cube (fig. 24), is ​ ​ another form of desperate evasion. Sitting atop a pedestal in his most recent exhibition at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York, was a glass cube filled with the wiring of an internet server. Paglen’s server hosted a connection to Tor, “a global network of ​ ​ thousands of volunteer­run servers, relays, and services designed to help anonymize data and internet use,” that anyone in the gallery could connect to via Wifi, thus encrypting and protecting their internet usage.39 Autonomy Cube, much like HOW NOT ​ ​ ​ TO BE SEEN, critiques systems of surveillance while providing counter­surveillance ​ tactics to undermine those very same systems. The fact that HOW NOT TO BE SEEN, ​ ​ although satirical, exists as a video work available for free consumption on the internet––is exemplative of the fact that Steyerl’s political message is meant to inform.40

The language Steyerl includes in Section IV of HOW NOT TO BE SEEN alludes to the ​ ​ very dire repercussions of what can potentially occur to the surveilled subject––and the poor image, consequently––like the horrifying graphic language of someone being

“eliminated, liquidated, and then dissimulated.” The video’s grim and alarming message, juxtaposed with satire through a quasi­instructional narrative, reflects the competing tensions of surveillance and autonomy.

Contextualizing Unreliable Images in the Digital Sphere

39 For Trevor Paglen’s artist statement, see his website: http://paglen.com/index.php?l=work&s=cube. ​ 40 Many artists who produce video works do not make them available to the public, outside of a ​ ​ gallery or exhibition setting.

37 Another way of understanding these seemingly oppositional tensions of omnipresent surveillance and freeing flexibility in Steyerl’s work, is to consider how other artists have conceptualized the digital image. Contemporary artist Artie Vierkant writes in his seminal essay, “The Image Object Post­Internet,” that “Post­internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility of digital materials.”41 Vierkant sees the digital image as object itself, transforming the previous antiquated notion of the image as representative of something else, and instead solidifying its place as a material thing. ​ ​ Once conceptualized as objects, they are transferable, subject to social relations of exchange. This is unequivocally a transformation of the digital age, where images are produced, manipulated, circulated, and exchanged as “currency” on the internet.

While Vierkant’s conclusions are illuminating of the ways in which images must be reimagined as objects with their own social production and values to fit the contemporary digital moment, his analysis does not provide much insight into some of the more troubling political realities of the image in its present digital state. For this interpretation, it is useful to consider the written work of Steyerl herself, who has produced numerous scholarly essays on the state of the image in digital contexts.42 Her most conceptually resonant essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” asserts that the

“poor image,” or the low­resolution, endlessly shared, pirated, distorted, and low­quality image, is actually a symbolic reflection of the ways in which global, capitalist flows of

41 Vierkant, Artie. The Image Object Post­Internet. 2010. http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html ​ ​ ​ ​ 42 Most of these can be found in her book of essays, Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. ​ ​ ​ Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.

38 exchange circulate poor people for violent exploitation––one might think about the

“expendable” migrant laborer, for example. Steyerl explains that:

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images––their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities.”43

As an artistic statement, Steyerl’s essay situates the digital image as circumstantially unreliable, and also asserts how revealing a “poor” image can be––an image that is poor in visual quality (in this case, blurred, low­resolution, but also can be pixelated, cropped, etc.) but also “poor” in the sense of how it can reveal socio­economic realities.

Conclusion

Hito Steyerl’s HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV ​ File (2013) responds to a particular historical and contemporary moment, and is about a ​ dualistic, competing tension between hypervisibility and invisibility in the digital age, an age where privacy no longer exists, and self­making––especially self­making in digital spaces––is a charged process where safety and agency is at stake.

By animating her own image from representation to materiality, Steyerl confirms the image’s very real significance and how the image can potentially affect the hypervisibility and invisibility of artistic subjects and everyday people. The satirical yet

43 Steyerl, Hito. "In Defense of the Poor Image." E­Flux Journal 10 (November 2009), 33. Directly ​ ​ alluding to Frantz Fanon’s 1961 classic The Wretched of the Earth, Steyerl juxtaposes ​ ​ contemporary global capitalism’s effect on image circulation and negotiation with Fanon’s analysis of violent imperialist discourse as it affects the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.

39 didactic nature of HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File is ​ ​ actually quite discomfiting, especially with the inclusion of the artist herself in the video, and yet the work is successful in its intent. In order to escape the watchful omnipresence of the surveillance state, Steyerl is attempting to “become” invisible, but at the same time, chooses to include her own body in the video work, suggesting that her presence is real but can be self­manipulated, and ultimately is fluid. ​ ​

40 III

Historical Fetishism, Identity Tourism, and Self­Making on the Internet: Fluid Color

in Adriana Varejão’s Self­Portraits

Introduction

Skin color, since early periods in art history, has been depicted in many different modes of artistic production. It has been concretized as a representative force that is visually tangible––didactically displayed in artwork since the colonial era to circumscribe stereotypes, hierarchies, and oppressions related to race. In recent history, artists have been questioning the rigidity and validity of racial categories and emphasizing race instead as a social construct––in many cases, through creative and conceptual uses of color in their artworks.

Contemporary Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão, mostly known for her paintings featuring traditional Portuguese tilework designs with bloody, human­like entrails emerging from their fissures, appropriates historical Brazilian imagery related to colonization. In the paintings she is most known for, Varejão hints at some of the gruesome violence that is hidden beneath official colonial histories. The ornate beauty of the emblematic Portuguese tilework in her paintings is overshadowed by the frightening realities of colonial––and neo­colonial––exploitation and violence.

This chapter attempts to map how Adriana Varejão’s various self­portrait series,

Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series), and Kindred ​ ​ ​ ​ Spirits use elements like pixels of color and repetition to illustrate some of the historical ​

41 and contemporary anxieties concerning skin color and race, and ultimately how racial categories are fluid in the digital age.

Categorization and Collecting the Fetish in Colonial Casta Paintings ​ ​

The history of race in the Americas arguably begins with the “social, economic, and political conditions in which the ponderings about human difference took place: explorations of Africa, the conquest of the New World, colonialism, slavery.”44 Prior to this historical moment of encounter between the indigenous populations of the Americas, the colonial forces of Europe, and slaves brought forcibly from the African continent, race as a visual identifier and mode of hierarchy did not exist. Indeed, in order to maintain a system of hierarchy and control, colonial powers had to develop and implement a rigid system of classification in order to maintain order in their power­imbalanced society. The invention of race as a social construct functioned as a way to establish social difference and maintain control over dominated populations. Of course, aspects other than skin color also functioned as racial identifiers, like religion and language, for example, and were used to further establish difference in the hierarchy. For the sake of analyzing the self­portrait works of Adriana Varejão, it is useful to outline how skin color specifically has been constructed as a powerful visual identifier from the colonial era until the present day. The selected works by Varejão that will be analyzed in this project vary explicitly in their use of color to express skin pigmentation, reflecting concerns about the rigidity of those very identifiers in the present day.

44 Wade, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. (Chicago, IL: Pluto Press, 1997), 7. ​ ​

42 In Magali M. Carrera’s 2003 book Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, ​ Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings, she conceptualizes ​ the colonial gaze as a technique for establishing and solidifying a visual culture of difference. She explains:

In colonial visual discourse, the gaze is a visual totality, that single, central vantage point from which surveillance or looking occurs. The colonial gaze and its mechanism of surveillance are strategies for difference and dominance, that is, strategies to overcome ambiguity and locate hybridity. In the teetering equation that is colonialism, the Other must constantly be under surveillance, watched for any shifts in behaviors, appearances, and movements.45

Understandably, a system of oppression that depends so heavily on invented difference is a “teetering” one––one constantly under the threat of collapse. In fact, the foremost visual vehicle established as a concrete aspect of the visual culture, was the casta ​ painting, an implementation of the scientific, controlling gaze. A visual genre of New

Spain until about the early nineteenth century, colonial casta painting visually outlined ​ ​ the organization of the social caste hierarchies that were implemented by colonial forces in the so­called “New World.” In order to maintain the strict racial hierarchy necessary for maintaining this status quo, colonial powers in the Americas developed an intricate racial caste system with a very specific order: españoles located in Europe were at the top of ​ ​ the chain (those with power in the homeland), followed by criollos (locally­born Christians ​ ​ of Spanish descent), then indios (or indigenous groups), and ultimately, negros (African ​ ​ ​ ​ slave populations). In a typical casta painting diagram, a grouping of painted panels ​ ​ depict the different racial castes by signifying male­female partnerships along with the varying possible outcomes of racial mixture through their offspring. For example, closer

45 Carrera, Magali. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in ​ ​ Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. ​

43 to the top of the vertical grouping of oil painting panels would be racial mixtures of españoles and their children, who were understood to have the “purest” blood.46 One ​ painting panel might indicate De Español y de India, produce Mestiso, while another ​ ​ closer to the bottom of the hierarchy would indicate De Negro y de India, produce Lobo, ​ ​ for example (fig. 25­26). ​ Casta paintings unequivocally functioned in order to discourage miscegenation ​ among the “purest of blood,” as the top­down hierarchy indicates. However, despite the categorization and strict, explicit distinction between racial groups in these paintings, the reality was that within these caste systems in the colonies were many instances of racial mixing, so much so that miscegenation became a product of colonial life.47 Writing specifically about Mexico, curator and art historian Ilona Katzew has noted that the diversity of the heterogenous groups present in casta paintings “was not meant to imply ​ ​ a harmonious coexistence of the diverse races, but instead to remind both colonial subjects and the Spanish Crown that Mexico was still an ordered, hierarchical society in which each group occupied a specific socioeconomic niche defined largely by race.”48 In this sense, the paintings were concretized as an understood visual culture, establishing and entrenching social notions of race and class through visual signifiers.

The function of casta paintings also extended beyond the colonies. Of course, ​ ​ mixed­race populations would produce a lot of anxiety for the criollos in power in New ​ ​

46 In many cases, these paintings are numbered, in order to maintain the hierarchy numerically and systematically––indicative of the kind of pseudo­scientific obsession with classification, knowledge, and control. Consider also the ‘cabinets of the world’ popular during the Enlightenment era, which attempted to map encyclopedic collections of naturalia and artificialia phenomena for the sake of ​ ​ ​ ​ displaying one’s accumulation of knowledge, wealth, and power. 47 Consider, for example, that rape culture was just as much of an institution during the colonial era as was religion, warfare, etc. which led to the growth of mixed­race populations in the “New World.” 48 Katzew, Ilona. "Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico." In New ​ ​ ​ World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America, (New York: Americas Society, 1996), ​ 8­29.

44 Spain, but for Spaniards back in Europe, casta paintings also functioned as glimpses ​ ​ into an exotic phenomenon. Racial mixture became a distinguishing feature of colonial life, so much so that Europeans who had never before been exposed to such processes may have been fascinated by the visual diagrams presented in the casta paintings. In ​ ​ terms of viewership and audience in Europe, Magali Carrera explains that “these paintings served the curiosity of colonial aristocrats and upper­class Europeans whose lives were unrelated to those of the people in the paintings.”49 Casta paintings became ​ ​ such a popular visual genre that the works were increasingly being commissioned by powerful forces across the Atlantic. Present in the works were peoples and phenomena unknown to Europeans, depicted as static, exotic, and as isolated cultural artifacts, seemingly isolated from the forces of reality––like colonialism and conquest––produced by the Europeans themselves. This is where it is useful to consider how scholars like

Edward Said and Homi K Bhabha have conceptualized fetishism. Within colonialist structures and discourse, Homi K Bhabha states in his essay “The Other Question: Homi ​ K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse” that: ​ ​ ​ ...the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor as substitution (masking absence and difference) and metonymy (which contiguously registers the perceived lack). The fetish or stereotype gives access to an 'identity' which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and dis­avowal of it. This conflict of pleasure/unpleasure, mastery/defence, knowledge/disavowal, absence/presence, has a fundamental significance for colonial discourse. For the scene of fetishism is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of primal fantasy––the subject's desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division.50

49 Carrera, Magali. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in ​ ​ Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. ​ 50 Bhabha, Homi K. "The Other Question: Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse." Screen, November/December 1983, 18­36. Accessed March 13, 2016. Black Studies ​ ​ Center (ProQuest).

45 So, in the case of the racial mixtures presented in casta paintings, the fetishized subjects ​ ​ were exoticized as objects of pleasure and fantasy, while simultaneously representing difference, further concretizing the notions of superiority, mastery, and ownership already in place in the colonial racial hierarchy. Casta paintings began to be collected ​ ​ not just as images of anxious warning, but instead as informative or documentarian images, representative of the desire to fetishize and therefore collect the “Other.”

The issue of commissioning works and therefore collecting, is telling of the colonial mindset of the time of the casta painting, and arguably up until the contemporary ​ ​ moment, where issues of skin color and social hierarchy are still being tackled by contemporary artists like Adriana Varejão. In conceptualizing the collector’s impulse historically, cultural theorist Mieke Bal writes in Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective ​ on Collecting that the collector’s main motivational impulse is the desire to narrate, or tell ​ ​ stories that evade conventional modes of expression. However, in a more critical light,

Bal also states that “underlying most of these motivations, is a developmental narrative

[...]: fetishism. In the West, collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity. [...] The act of collecting becomes a form of subordination, appropriation, de­personification.”51 Bal’s theoretical outline of the collector’s impulse aptly explains the phenomenon of the casta painting and its purpose ​ ​ during the colonial period. The object, in this case the racialized social “Other,” is captured in order to be understood––these pseudo­scientific depictions in casta ​ paintings were commissioned specifically to satisfy that fetishistic collector’s impulse.

The paintings were collected by those in power––both in the colonies and back in

51 Bal, Mieke. "Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting." In The Cultures of ​ Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 97­115. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University ​ Press, 1994.

46 Europe––in order to, by extension, collect and own the “Other.” Depicted often in fetishistic caricature, these renderings helped to further concretize racial stratification.

The collector’s motivation, establishing an “authentic, possessive self,” was satisfied by the classification and ownership of the “Other” as a form of social dominance and control. This dueling tension between fear and pleasure as it relates to the fetishized other––meaning the colonizer’s impulse to achieve mastery in knowledge about the other, whilst also maintaining anxiety and fear of the other––helped to establish and concretize racial difference during colonial times, with reverberations to the present day.

Adriana Varejão’s contemporary self­portrait series, along with the works of many other contemporary artists globally, attempts to complicate the notion of color difference and the myth of race as an identifiable visual marker. Specifically, Varejão’s self­portrait paintings critique the casta painting tradition directly because of the similarity in medium and portrait format, directly citing the genre’s obsession with color and classification, as well as its inherent absurdity.

Reducing Race to Color & Illuminating the Social Construct: Art Historical Examples

In Adriana Varejão’s most recent self­portrait series, she uses color pixels, color wheels, and repetition to indicate how contemporary notions of race are malleable social constructs. Using a similar artistic methodology to that of the casta painting––the ​ ​ oil­painted portrait––at first glance Varejão’s works evoke historical concerns about rigid racial classification. However, the inclusion of contemporary iconography like color wheels and color swatches into the paintings themselves, suggests that skin color, as it relates to race as construct, is something that is very nuanced, malleable, fluid, and

47 ultimately up to the depicted subject’s own discretion. Other artists have executed similar missions conceptually in their works, and it is important to note that there does in fact exist an art­historical precedent for the primary works of analysis in this essay.

In 1993, at the height of race anxiety in an increasingly gentrifying New York City, a collaborative conceptual work by Byron Kim and Glenn Ligon was shown in the 1993

Whitney Museum Biennial. Many of the artworks shown in that biennial referred explicitly to critical issues of the time––at the height of the AIDS crisis, the biennial’s curators selected works that specifically engaged relevant social issues like poverty, sexual discrimination, and race relations in urban contexts. The work shown by Kim and Ligon stands out because of its conceptual subtlety amidst other works whose messages were much more explicit. Titled Black & White, the work incorporates store­bought, pre­mixed, ​ ​ paint pigments to demonstrate the variations of flesh colors available––and unavailable––on the market (fig. 27). Quite visibly, the light “flesh­colored” variations of color, which were labeled as such on the pigment labels themselves, have a depth and range of color to select from. The “black­colored” tones displayed, are much less diverse in range, and work to illustrate the very limited variety of blackness available in commercial pigments. Commenting on the limitations of what is considered “flesh” and what skin tones are negated human association, the work reduces the construction of race to swatches of color, that when displayed on wood panels in a grid­like formation, does not seem to indicate humanity at all, but rather a detached and lifeless display.

Color, in Black & White, as a substitute for a social identity like race, is made illegible. ​ ​ Quite similar to Black & White, Carrie Mae Weems’s work from 2009­2010, ​ ​ Untitled (Colored People Grid), uses a similar strategy in dissolving the human portrait ​ into simplified insinuations of color. Organized in a grid­like pattern, similar to the work

48 by Kim and Ligon, Untitled (Colored People Grid) situates the visages of photographed ​ ​ subjects of color amongst bold swatches of vivid hues (fig. 28). The portraits, amidst the solid swatches of color, are all tinted in such a way that the images themselves recede into the background, and the usage of color becomes the most prominent feature of the work in its entirety. By juxtaposing the color­infused portraits of human subjects with panels of solid color, Weems’s Untitled (Colored People Grid) reflects on the ​ ​ contemporary and historical anxieties of color as representative of identity. For many people of color, race can be a feature that is unavoidable in how socialization works societally––even though race itself is an invented social construct. Weems’s oeuvre more broadly considers the constructs of race, gender, and sexuality, and through photography and portraiture, questions their structural rigidity.

Another artist who successfully uses an abundance and range of color in their work is contemporary Nigerian artist Toyin Odutola. Using ink pens in various radiant hues, Odutola creates portraits of black subjects whose skin pigmentation and facial features are radiantly composed of a heterogeneous variety of color. Skin color, in the case of Odutola’s portraits, suggests much broader understandings of blackness, and upon closer investigation, a work like Uncertain, Yet Reserved, for example, reveals a ​ ​ range of vibrant colors that comprise the black skin tone in its totality (fig. 29). In

Odutola’s Uncertain, Yet Reserved portrait, the lone figure depicted meets the gaze of ​ ​ the audience, and the bare skin is illuminated by hues of blues, greens, oranges, and golds. Resplendent in color, the black skin of the depicted subject does not feel reliant on those indications of vibrant color throughout the drawing. Blackness, in this case, is illuminated as a hue comprised of many other colors.

49 As a final example, William Pope.L’s 2011­2013 Skin Set Paintings, are ​ ​ multimedia works that visually incorporate the anxieties of skin color as a racial identifier

(fig. 30­31). The many works in this series by Pope.L instigate a complication of the ​ ways in which color is conceptualized. Some of the works refer to constructions of race specifically, while others focus more on the complexities surrounding color theory and language. In his Skin Set Paintings series, Pope.L frantically uses color and text to try ​ ​ and personify chaotic and frenzied conflicts of self­expression. Some of which are illegible, the messages works embody some of the nuances we desperately try to work through when talking about color and race.

I include these mostly contemporary artistic examples to indicate that Adriana

Varejão’s work belongs to a legacy of artistic concerns that are still extremely relevant in the present day. Examinations of race and racial hierarchies in painting are as old as the colonial era, but artists continue to conceptually examine how these concerns are relevant societally and in their lives. I also think it is worthwhile to argue that Adriana ​ Varejão’s self­portrait paintings have a special significance within her national context of

Brazil, where social hierarchy is codified specifically by color, and less so by “race” as identity, per se. According to sociologist Edward Telles in The Overlapping Concepts of ​ Race and Colour in Latin America, “[In Brazil], colour and racial identity are different ​ ways to capture the multiple manifestations of the larger concept of race. Our measure of skin colour more directly captures physical variation and thus might be considered more objective and capture race as seen by others, which is important for discrimination.”52 This is especially apparent in the self­portrait series by Adriana

52 Telles, Edward. "The Overlapping Concepts of Race and Colour in Latin America." Ethnic and ​ Racial Studies 35, no. 7 (2012): 1163­168. Accessed March 13, 2016. ​ doi:10.1080/01419870.2012.657209.

50 Varejão, where a rich variety in color is represented through elements like color wheels, color swatches, and repetition.

Brazilian Specificity in Adriana Varejão’s Self­Portrait Works

While Adriana Varejão’s artistic agency ties into larger questions concerning self­making in the digital age, and how internet artists specifically have been questioning how rigidly identity structures and categories are circumscribed societally, in a more nation­specific context, her works can be read with a deeper significance. Through her use of color, Adriana Varejão is specifically critiquing a system that circumscribes racial categories and hierarchy in the first place. Within the context of Brazil––a nation that has been falsely constructed as a colorblind racial democracy, when the reality is actually far from that––her critique is particularly striking.

Varejão aptly critiques two facets of contemporary race relations in Brazil: both the anxious obsession of classifying color itself, as well as the idea of the existence of a harmonious racial democracy resulting historically from miscegenation. In many interviews, Varejão herself has referred to the national census of 1976 which occurred in

Brazil. That year’s census was the first time that the Brazilian nation provided its citizens with the option to classify themselves according to their own identification along the color spectrum. The result––indicative of both the heterogeneity present in Brazil as well as its citizens’ obsession with classification and color––was hundreds of different entries, with varying yet extremely specific terms like loira, jambo, castanha, morena, parda, canela, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

51 sarará, and marrom, to provide a few examples.53 These results exemplify the ​ ​ ​ dissatisfaction felt by Brazilians, as Stanley R. Bailey and Edward Telles explain in their essay From Ambiguity to Affirmation: Challenging Census Race Categories in Brazil: ​ ​ “Despite 130 years of using the same census terms, nearly half of the Brazilian population prefers to self­classify using terms that are not in the census.”54 Racial terminology in Brazil has always been conceptualized primarily as based on color, because of the way census questions have been formulated. Sociologist Stanley R.

Bailey explains in his book Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil ​ that self­identification questions on national censuses asked: “‘Considering the following categories, what is your color or race?’” and further explains that “The term race was added in 1991 after over 100 years of asking only about color.”55 In Adriana Varejão’s paintings, color is used as a symbolic substitute for race, which is very similar to how color has been historically constructed by the Brazilian nation­state, further augmenting

Varejão’s critique.

Arguably, representations of race as social identity in digital spaces are diverse but also incredibly fluid. Race, in the digital sphere, can be appropriated, co­opted, and performed by actors whose race in real life does not match their digital selves. This is the supposed flexibility and anonymity that the digital interface allows. In her book, Digitizing ​ Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, communication scholar Lisa Nakamura ​ ​ explains––perhaps more ominously––that “the Internet facilitates identity tourism,

53 Loira indicates blond hair with white skin, jambo after a deep red fruit, castanha for chestnut ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ color, morena for tan, parda for dark brown skin, canela for cinnamon color, sarará for ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ black­and­white mixed person with red hair, and marrom for chocolate brown skin. These are just a ​ ​ few examples of the incredible range and diversity of terminology that Brazilians use to self­identify. 54 Bailey, Stanley R., and Edward Telles. "From Ambiguity to Affirmation: Challenging Census Race Categories in Brazil." TS, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/telles/Paper_AffirmationandAmbiguity.pdf, UCLA. 55 Bailey, Stanley R. Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil. Stanford, CA: ​ ​ Stanford University Press, 2009.

52 creating a new form of digital play and ideological work that helped define an empowered and central self against an exotic and distant Other.”56 The self, as produced in the fluid state of the digital sphere, is inherently multiple. Considering this analysis, it makes sense that Varejão’s self­portrait works are actually painted by someone that

Varejão herself had hired––someone with more technical skill, raising conceptual questions about authorship. However, the fact that each portrait is repetitive precisely accentuates its reproducibility, mimicking the way racial identity is reproduced in the digital sphere. As a series, the self­portraits function as images that exhibit no other noticeable permutations, other than the isolated change of skin color. They reflect the accuracy and precise control of a digitized system that facilitates changes in social identity categories very easily, sometimes dispassionately, and with a sense of stoic detachment.

That is perhaps what makes Varejão’s self­portrait series so successful––she is critiquing her own self through the lens of the nation. As a wealthy, light­skinned contemporary artist recognized in the international sphere, she does not suffer in the ​ same ways as other non­whites in Brazil, but still lives within a national framework where racism supposedly does not exist and instead there is racial harmony. One of the common critiques sometimes provided by those who like to defend this myth of a utopic

“racial democracy” is that race is understood differently in Brazil than in the United

States.57 Adriana Varejão’s self­portraits offer a critique that can be both specific to a

56 Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of ​ ​ Minnesota Press, 2008. 57 This is, of course, despite the fact that overwhelmingly the people in poverty in Brazil are ​ non­White, and various activists groups have declared that there is currently a genocide decimating Brazil’s black youth, a result of the Brazilian police state.

53 Brazilian context and yet universal enough to apply to the history of skin color and race as visual culture and its iterations in the contemporary moment.

Color as Unreliable: The Manipulable, Reproducible Image in the Digital Age

In understanding visual culture and visuality, art historian Nicholas Mirzoeff writes in An Introduction to Visual Culture that “it is possible for modes of representation to ​ ​ ​ change over time or to be challenged by other means of representation. In short, seeing is not believing but interpreting.”58 In Mirzoeff’s analysis, visual cultures are malleable throughout time and space precisely because they rely on visual interpretation. When considering Adriana Varejão’s self­portrait series Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), Polvo ​ ​ ​ Portraits I (Seascape Series), and Kindred Spirits, it is useful to examine how skin color ​ ​ ​ and race have changed historically and throughout different geographic and cultural contexts.

Adriana Varejão’s Polvo Portraits series are examinations of the artist’s own ​ ​ identity––both perceived and self­attributed. The series also work in dissolving the rigidity of racial categories in the contemporary moment. Polvo, in Portuguese, translates ​ ​ to octopus––a direct reference to the melanin present in octopus ink, which is the key factor in the pigmentation of human skin. In Varejão’s Polvo Portraits I (Seascape ​ Series) and Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), the artist’s own visage is depicted ​ ​ ​ repeatedly with different skin tones (fig. 32­33). The portraits are lifeless and cold, and although they are painted in oil, still suggest images that have been reproduced by a type of distant technology like Photoshop. In both self­portrait series, Varejão

58 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. ​ ​

54 incorporates pixels of color, color wheels, and color swatches along with the portraits themselves, indicating that her examinations of skin color are really just artistic experimentations with pigmented material. In the self­portraits, the differences in color are purely visual formalities, insinuating that ascribing color to race as an identifier is also an exercise in social construction.

The earliest work by Adriana Varejão that is useful for the argument of this project is Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series) from 2013. Quite similar to the other two ​ ​ artworks I have chosen to analyze, Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series) serves as an ​ ​ original study by Varejão for thematic concerns she has considered in her artistic career until the present moment. A triptych set of oil paintings, Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series) ​ portrays self­portraits of the artist in different skin tones. Painted behind each portrait is a simple brown textured background, and below each portrait, occupying about ⅙ of the surface area of the canvas, are square swatches of color in various flesh tones, as well as greys and bright pinks. These swatches of color, square in shape, suggest pixels or swatches taken from the depicted images themselves.

Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series) is similar to Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series) ​ ​ in form and in content. Also a triptych of oil paintings, Varejão’s Polvo Portraits I ​ ​ ​ (Seascape Series) depicts the face of the artist herself. Neutral in gaze, each portrait ​ displays the artist’s slight smile, corners of the mouth pointing upwards timidly. Formally, the painted subject’s facial features are identical in each canvas, thus emphasizing the only differentiating feature which functions as the focal point of the three works as a unit––the color used for each portrait’s skin. In the background of each canvas, floating pixels and a color wheel of flesh­colored hues disjoint the painted images and highlight the materiality of the paint itself. Much like Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), a fraction of ​ ​

55 the surface area of each canvas is devoted to square shaped swatches of color, further emphasizing the possibilities for skin color pigmentation through the usage of oil paint, while at the same time destabilizing the colors used on the three portraits.

Skin color, in Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series) and in Polvo Portraits I (Classic ​ ​ ​ Series) is represented by differences in pigmentation, and in both works, it is also ​ reduced to an exercise in experimentation. The color swatches, color wheels, and pixels are indicative of an experimental artistic process that is intentionally incorporated into each finalized, finished portrait. One might consider how digital images are edited in programs like Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, where color swatches are easily accessible tools used by designers and artists alike (fig. 34). These visual traces of artistic experimentation with color suggest how the boundaries of constructed social identity––in this case, the boundaries of racial identity––are increasingly intangible in contemporary digital culture.

In Adriana Varejão’s most recent exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary, titled

Kindred Spirits, the artist goes one step further in conceptualizing color as a racial ​ construct.59 Across the exhibition space, color wheels abound (Polvo Color Wheels), ​ ​ similar to the ones included in Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series) and in Polvo Portraits ​ ​ ​ I (Classic Series), but enlarged to a diameter of 52 inches and occupying the entire ​ space of a circular canvas (fig. 35). The wheels overwhelm the viewer in large physical size, as well as the size of the oil­painted portraits present in the space (fig. 36). Along with these color wheels, the inclusion of installed features like cases of oil paints on pedestals in the exhibition space––a work titled Polvo Oil Colors––Varejão reduces skin ​ ​ color to a manipulable pigment that can be applied and removed (fig. 37). In Polvo Oil ​

59 The title of the exhibition is also the title of the self­portraits present in the show.

56 Colors, skin color is conceptually reduced and literally contained within tubes of color ​ pigments. Color, representative of skin and racial difference, becomes a tangible, material object available for usage by the artist and up to her discretion. Displayed in this format, the work recalls the way in which color samples have been used by the previously discussed contemporary artists Carrie Mae Weems, Byron Kim, and Glenn

Ligon.

The fact that Varejão’s experimental processes are embodied through digital modes of display, like pixels, swatches and color wheels, suggests that even racial markers and categories can be diffused in the digital sphere. In this assertion, I suggest primarily that contemporary digital culture allows users from heterogeneous backgrounds to interact and perform in digital spaces that have been created and frequented by users of color––often these spaces contain content informed by slang and popular culture originating from communities of color.60 In terms of digital participation in these spaces, the social identities of users behind the screen are blurred, obscured and easily manipulated. In Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, a chapter is ​ ​ devoted to Lisa Nakamura’s 2002 study of internet chat rooms and bulletin boards, and she discusses this phenomenon as digital “identity tourism,” explaining that “the internet is a theater of sorts, a theater of performed identities [...] that allows a [user] to appropriate a racial identity without any of the risks of associated with being a racial minority in real life.”61 Although the sites of communication that Nakamura uses as case studies are perhaps a bit outdated for the present, identity tourism in contemporary

60 Some examples include interactivity on what is colloquially known as Black Twitter, as well as hashtags like #Latinasbelike and Latino­identity specific shareable memes and users (Pero Like, Lejuan James, etc.) on Vine, Instagram, and Youtube related to the primarily immigrant, working­class, and racialized Latino experience in the United States. 61 Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, ​ ​ ​ 2002.

57 internet spaces still occurs, easily facilitated by filters, photo editing software, and easy access to racialized digital spaces––identity tourism occurs through moments of self­making and interactivity. When considering how this phenomenon relates to the work of Adriana Varejão, it is entirely necessary to associate identity tourism with historical notions of fetishism. The dualistic tension explained by Bhabha in a previous section of this chapter outlines how fetishism is defined by competing feelings of

“pleasure/unpleasure, mastery/defence, knowledge/disavowal, [and] absence/presence.”

62 In an increasingly globalized era of pop culture, identity tourism and appropriation are issues of critical importance, and Varejão’s use of color swatches, color wheels, and repetition allude to the potential concerns associated with a fluid understanding of racial identity.

Conclusion

Ultimately, all three works by Adriana Varejão provide insight into how images––especially racialized ones––have been historically constructed and how they are unreliable because of their manipulability in the contemporary digital moment.

Varejão’s self­portraits, repeated on different canvases, suggest the distant, repetitive stoicism embodied in the digital generation’s fascination with the selfie. Reduced to swatches of color, manipulated, and repeated, the works resemble the glossy, perfect, and somewhat hollow digitized portraits we are so accustomed to seeing.

62 Bhabha, Homi K. "The Other Question: Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse." Screen, November/December 1983, 18­36. Accessed March 13, 2016. Black Studies ​ ​ Center (ProQuest).

58 Keeping in mind the potential perils of identity tourism and fetishism in the contemporary digital moment, Adriana Varejão’s self­portrait series help to dismantle some of the rigidity around racial identity and to expose its essence as social construct.

Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series), and Kindred ​ ​ ​ ​ Spirits all use elements like pixels of color, color wheels, and repetition to expose some ​ of the historical understanding around color and race, while also using contemporary visual signifiers for contrast and to destabilize racial categories and hierarchies.

Ultimately, these self­portrait series reflect the increasingly fluid nature of social identity categories in the present day, when digital technologies allow for increased agency amongst users who can manipulate their self­representations in the digital sphere.

59 Thesis Conclusion

Rafia Santana, Hito Steyerl, and Adriana Varejão, all use self­portraiture to illustrate how unreliable digital images allow for freedom and flexibility, with certain caveats. Santana’s selfies incorporate glitch abstraction to present feelings of frustration and anxiety to the viewer. Santana is unique in that her selfies make up her broader artistic practice, which extends itself onto internet spaces where her images and words participate in processes of collective healing and solidarity for women of color. Steyerl’s video work, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, ​ ​ instructs a fictitious audience on how to make oneself invisible, and continually points to images as errant modes of representation. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN delivers an anxious ​ ​ tone of warning––despite its moments of humor––about the hypervisibility of the surveilled subject and the invisibility of the marginalized body. Varejão’s oil paintings, who fit the least neatly into internet art as genre, still reveal the various manual and digital processes behind image manipulation. Like the unreliable image that is always subject to the artist’s touch, Varejão’s images imply that our social identities have the potential to be self­made, rather than subject to the norms in place by societal hierarchies.

The unreliable images affords infinite possibilities. When considered as a tactic or process in an artistic practice, rather than a concrete and finalized product, its benefits as a visual strategy emerge. Artists like Santana, Varejão, and Steyerl who use abstraction methodologies in their self­portraiture are intentional about the projected selves they present to a potential audience. They are agents in that decision­making process where their unreliable images work to their advantage in providing flexibility and

60 nuance. In addition to how the unreliable image can illuminate how artists choose to engage in self­representation of their own unique identities, they also highlight the inherent fallibility of digital technologies. Abstraction of the digital image can point to the ways in which those technologies have deteriorated in the past, as well as their potential for decline in the future.

61 Bibliography

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, ​ ​ 1987. Print.

Bailey, Stanley R., and Edward Telles. "From Ambiguity to Affirmation: Challenging Census Race Categories in Brazil." TS, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/telles/Paper_AffirmationandAmbiguity.pdf, UCLA.

Bailey, Stanley R. Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil. Stanford, ​ ​ CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Bal, Mieke. "Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting." In The Cultures of ​ Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 97­115. Cambridge, MA: ​ Harvard University Press, 1994.

Barker, Tim. "Aesthetic of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant." Edited by Mark Nunes. In Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media ​ Cultures, 42­58. New York: Continuum, 2011. ​ Barlow, John Perry. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Electronic ​ ​ Frontier Foundation. 1996. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace­independence.

Bhabha, Homi K. "The Other Question: Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse." Screen, November/December 1983, 18­36. Accessed ​ ​ March 13, 2016. Black Studies Center (ProQuest).

Brock, Andre. "Cultural Appropriations of Technical Capital." Information, ​ Communication & Society 13, no. 7 (2010): 1040­059. ​ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1369118X.2010.498897.

Brock, Andre. ""Who Do You Think You Are?": Race, Representation, and Cultural Rhetorics in Online Spaces." Poroi 6, no. 1 (2009): 15­35. ​ ​ http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=poroi. ​ Calderón­Douglass, Barbara. "Sad Girls Y Qué Are Breaking Down Machismo with Internet Art." Vice, October 24, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2016. ​ ​ http://www.vice.com/read/sad­girls­y­que­is­breaking­down­machismo­and­offering ­an­alternative­to­white­feminism­456.

Carrera, Magali. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body ​ in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. ​

62 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. "The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory." Critical ​ Inquiry, University of Chicago Press 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 148­71. ​ doi:10.1086/595632.

Connor, Michael. "Hito Steyerl's 'How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File'" Rhizome Blog (blog), May 31, 2013. ​ ​ http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/31/hito­steyerl­how­not­to­be­seen/.

Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media ​ Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. ​ Gates, Kelly. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of ​ Surveillance. New York: New York University Press, 2011. ​ González, Jennifer. "The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice." Camera Obscura, 70th ser., 24, no. 1 (2009): 37­65. ​ http://atc.berkeley.edu/201/readings2013/Gonzalez­Face_and_the_Public.pdf. ​ Greene, Rachel. Internet Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004. ​ ​ Gutiérrez, Raquel. "Veteranas and Rucas: Documenting 1990s Chicano Youth Culture." KCET, February 5, 2016. Accessed March 15, 2016. ​ https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/photos­of­east­la­in­the­1990s.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: ​ ​ Routledge, 1991. hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995. ​ ​ Katzew, Ilona. "Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico." In New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America, 8­29. New York: ​ Americas Society, 1996.

Lorde, Audre. "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." Sister Outsider: ​ Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984. N. pag. Print. ​ Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. ​ ​ Moradi, Iman. Introduction. In Glitch: Designing Imperfection. New York: Mark Batty ​ ​ Publisher, 2009.

Morning, Ann. "Multiraciality and Census Classification." In Global Mixed Race, edited by ​ ​ Rebecca King­O'Riain, 1­15. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Mullen, Laura. "Glitch." BOMB Magazine 107 (2009): 25. Web. 1 Apr. 2016. ​ ​

63 Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: ​ ​ Routledge, 2002.

Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University ​ ​ of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich, and Julian Assange. "In Conversation with Julian Assange." In The ​ Internet Does Not Exist, edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton ​ Vidokle, 207­44. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015.

Olson, Marisa. "Postinternet: Art After the Internet." In Art and the Internet, 212­15. ​ ​ London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013.

Paglen, Trevor. "Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State." Editorial. Creative ​ Time Reports, June 25, 2013. ​ http://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance­and­the­construction­of­a­ter ror­state/.

Paul, Christiane. "Renderings of Digital Art." Leonardo 35, no. 5 (2002): 471­84. ​ ​ http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577254?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. ​ Peters, Mischa. "Exit Meat: Digital Bodies in a Virtual World." In New Media: Theories ​ and Practices of Digitextuality, edited by Anna Everett and John Caldwell, 47­59. ​ New York: Routledge, 2003.

Rettberg, Jill W. Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and ​ Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ​ Sargent, Antwaun. "Can The ‘Art Hoe’ Movement Change Contemporary Art?" The ​ Creators Project, September 12, 2015. Accessed March 15, 2016. ​ http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/can­the­art­hoe­movement­change­contem porary­art.

Schor, Mira. "A Plague of Polemics." Art Journal 50, no. 4 (1991): 36­41. ​ ​ doi:10.2307/777321.

Steyerl, Hito. "In Defense of the Poor Image." E­flux Journal 10 (November 2009). ​ ​ Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. ​ ​ Telles, Edward. "The Overlapping Concepts of Race and Colour in Latin America." Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 7 (2012): 1163­168. Accessed March 13, 2016. ​ doi:10.1080/01419870.2012.657209.

64 Telles, Edward. Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. ​ ​ Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Vesna, Victoria. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. ​ ​ Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Vierkant, Artie. The Image Object Post­Internet. 2010. ​ ​ http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html. ​ Wade, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. Chicago, IL: Pluto Press, 1997. ​ ​ White, Michele. The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship. ​ ​ Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

65 Figures

Fig. 1: Frida Kahlo, El Venado Herido (The Wounded Deer), 1946, oil on masonite, 100” ​ ​ x 75”.

Fig. 2: Frida Kahlo, La Columna Rota (The Broken Column), 1944, oil on masonite, 15 ​ ​ 11/16” x 12 1/16”.

66

Fig. 3­6: Carrie Mae Weems, Photographs from Kitchen Table Series, 1990. gelatin ​ ​ ​ ​ silver print, 27 ¼” x 27 ¼”.

67 Fig. 7­8: Ana Mendieta, Untitled and Imagen de Yagul from Silueta Series, México, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 1973­1980.

Fig. 9: Ana Mendieta, Untitled from Silueta Series, México, 1973­1980. ​ ​ ​ ​

68 Fig.10: Juliana Huxtable, Untitled (Destroying Flesh) from the UNIVERSAL CROP TOPS ​ ​ ​ FOR ALL THE SELF CANONIZED SAINTS OF BECOMING series, 2015, inkjet print. ​

Fig. 11: Rafia Santana, Tired, 2014, digitally manipulated photograph. ​ ​

69

Fig. 12: Rafia Santana, Worked, 2015, digitally manipulated photograph. ​ ​

70

Fig. 13: Rafia Santana, Very Little Sleep, 2015, digitally manipulated photograph. ​ ​

71

Fig. 14: Still from Hito Steyerl. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ ​ .Mov File. 2013. Still image, single screen 1080p .mov file, 14min. © Hito Steyerl. ​

Fig. 15: From Jon Rafman’s ongoing project 9­Eyes (2009­2015) on his website. ​ ​ http://9­eyes.com/

72

Fig. 16: From Jon Rafman’s ongoing project 9­Eyes (2009­2015) on his website. ​ ​ http://9­eyes.com/

Fig. 17: From Jon Rafman’s ongoing project 9­Eyes (2009­2015) on his website. ​ ​ http://9­eyes.com/

73

Fig. 18: Still from Hito Steyerl. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ ​ .Mov File. 2013. Still image, single screen 1080p .mov file, 14min. © Hito Steyerl. ​

Fig. 19: Still from Hito Steyerl. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ ​ .Mov File. 2013. Still image, single screen 1080p .mov file, 14min. © Hito Steyerl. ​

74

Fig. 20: Still from Hito Steyerl. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ ​ .Mov File. 2013. Still image, single screen 1080p .mov file, 14min. © Hito Steyerl. ​

Fig. 21: Still from Hito Steyerl. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational ​ ​ .Mov File. 2013. Still image, single screen 1080p .mov file, 14min. © Hito Steyerl. ​

75

Fig. 22: Adam Harvey, Look No. 5, from the CV Dazzle series, 2010. ​ ​ ​ ​

Fig. 23: Juliana Huxtable, Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm), 2015, ​ ​ From the series UNIVERSAL CROP TOPS FOR ALL THE SELF CANONIZED SAINTS ​ OF BECOMING, 2015, Inkjet print. ​

76

Fig. 24: Trevor Paglen, Autonomy Cube, 2015, mixed media. ​ ​

Fig. 25: Juan Rodríguez Juárez, De Español y de India produce Mestiso, c. 1725, oil. ​ ​ Fig. 26: Artist Unknown, De Negro y de India produce Lobo, c. 1730, oil. ​ ​

77

Fig. 27: Byron Kim and Glenn Ligon, Black & White, 1993, oil on wood panels. ​ ​

Fig. 28: Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Colored People Grid), 2009­10, 11 pigment ink ​ ​ prints and 31 colored clay papers.

78

Fig. 29: Toyin Odutola, Uncertain, Yet Reserved, 2012, acrylic ink and pen ink on board. ​ ​

Figure 30: William Pope.L, Skin Set Painting: Purple People are Reason Bicarbonate, ​ ​ 2011­13. Figure 31: William Pope L. Skin Set Painting: Orange People are God when She is ​ Shitting, 2011­12. ​

79

Figure 32: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series), 2014, oil on canvas. ​ ​

Figure 33: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), 2013, oil on canvas. ​ ​

80

Figure 34: Screenshot of “Swatches” tool function from Photoshop.

Figure 35: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Color Wheel, 2015, oil on canvas. ​ ​

81

Figure 36: Photo by John Smith (@juansmithers), Dallas Contemporary Kindred Spirits exhibition image, from Instagram. ​

Figure 37: Adriana Varejão, Polvo Oil Colors, 2015. ​ ​

82