Facebook Analogue

(Social Network Analogue)

Proposal Draft 2: June 2008

Imagine a physical manifestation of your Facebook page, with everyone you know standing linked together – literally – in the same room. Do you picture them as their physical beings or as their online “persona”? Would you ‘write on their walls’, “bitch slap’, ‘hug’ or ‘poke’ them the way you do on the Internet? Have online relationships become more interesting, or better, than the face-to-face counterpart?

Facebook Analogue is an interactive, exploratory installation asking each visitor to physically represent themselves as a suspended object. Friends’ objects are then connected to via interweaving threads. As a result, the installation area becomes a gargantuan, spider-like, physical depiction of the city’s social network. Meanwhile, participants are free to intermingle and intertwine themselves within.

Facebook Analogue is a trigger for patrons to ponder the inherited human issues that have helped to accelerate the popular growth of online-heavy, sometimes exclusive social relationships: Are we lacking time and money for real human interaction with busy urban lifestyles? What is the value of collecting ‘friends’ as social capital? Is there a growing fear of personal experience and confrontations?

The installation focuses on process over results. The act of physically presenting oneself and connecting with friends is a play on the online social phenomenon. We can control the way we represent ourselves, and manipulate the way we communicate with and perceive each other. The level of involvement by the actual participants determines the process of the installation.

The initiation will be the artist’s own social network of 400 Facebook friends. Each friend will be represented by a pre-hung object, and connected according to their relationship to each other by multi-colored yarn threads.

As visitors outside of the artist’s network arrive at the installation, they are encouraged to identify themselves by attaching a personal object to one of the pre-hung wires and to find and connect other objects to people they might know, one by one. They can even leave messages with post-it notes, or simply make new friends by running into each other while trying to connect threads. The idea is to make it easier by inviting friends to come and meet at a location at the same time, and then identify one person’s object in the network and follow their connections.