OFLUXO

The Internet, cell phones, and social media networking, branding, and influencing are the creative and entrepreneurial tools and, at times, artworks themselves of the current generation. In the virtual realm, the individual possesses the agency and ability to construct a digital self or identity as real or as imagined as they wish. Ben Elliot debuts 5 new “Unreleased Selfies” from his archive. These images while curated and posed did not reflect his brand, the persona he carefully presents, shares, and sells online. While intended for digital viewing, they can be seen only here in real life. Influencers examines the current culture of self-branding and influencer marketing – how we construct ourselves, communicate online, build brands in our image and market ourselves – across a variety of disciplines – visual art, design, filmmaking, music – to suggest an interconnected and intermixed contemporary culture joining together people, brands, and fresh ideas.

 

What’s real versus imitation, what’s art versus life seems far less relevant to current youth culture than the individual’s autonomy in creating their brand in relationship to life, society, economics, and an audience. PC music, the domain of artists QT and Hannah Diamond, relies upon self-presentation or self-construction in relationship to product, capital, and influencer marketing. QT’s Hey QT Energy Drink, for example, embodies the artist’s personality and musical style in its effervescent bubbliness and yet sells much like her enterprising nature.

 

The audience is commodity, as artist Constant Dullaart proves in his work High Retention, Slow Delivery. Dullaart created, sold, and distributed 2.5 million Instagram accounts or followers to active Instagram accounts desiring an army of likes perhaps for self-validation or marketing advantage. Regardless of reason, the quantifiable social capital of attention is characteristic of contemporary influencer culture. How much of this is narcissism, a need for popularity, or a desire to feel celebrity? Johanna Jaskowska’s filters alter the face much like the creative form of the mask but also reveal our desire to alter. In navigating Influencers, the viewer may question how the economic power of quantified audiences in social media and influencer marketing culture affects independent expression and creativity.

 

The realm of conceptual art, social media, branding, and partnerships is not exempt from social critique and satire. The exhibition, in fact, encourages us to reflect and reconsider the perhaps superficial nature of how we present ourselves and communicate with others. Ben Elliot ultimately proposes a limitless and collaborative idea of contemporary culture much like the networks the exhibiting artists and influencers utilize and analyze. A linear model of culture differentiating creative disciplines is the past. In this new sociocultural structure lies the potential for a new kind of creative and entrepreneur.