From URL To IRL

From URL To IRL, an immersive performance-installation, examines the dichotomous nature of social media: individualist and collective (narcissistic and communal), democratizing and disempowering, present and archival, curated and unfiltered, public and private, intimate and remote. It further explores the hidden labor of internet performance in terms of both cultural production and corporately monetized data creation. From URL To IRL transports everyday digital content into the realm of the "uncanny" - through subversion of medium and location, constructing an experience that merges the online and offline worlds we constantly straddle.

From URL To IRL is comprised of three distinct forums: a physical rendering of my Facebook history, and two activated spaces (one communal and one private) streaming online communication via live performance. For the collaborative piece, I invited five artists from my FB network: Darcie Blake, Apurva Kaushik, Gem Rosenberg, Mounira Marzouki and Madeline Zappala, to each perform their archive of posts. Their voices reflect the political, the mundane, and the in-between - all through the shared lens of femme identity and intimacy. This mini newsfeed is simultaneously historical and fictional - present and past, given its content (previously published text) and context (subverting the algorithm and medium of communication).

By placing my URL social network, private messages and data archive into an IRL environment, more specifically into my personal domestic sphere, I welcome a new kind of home intruder - the voyeur. This concept reflects the kind of invitation we make when we post publicly online. And yet, we are often unaware of the "internet gaze" - if someone doesn't "like" or "comment", it is almost if they don't exist. When this behavior is physicalized, there is no room for that kind of denial and comfort. From URL To IRL invites invasion into a space that is the ultimate intimate, a place where I often isolate and am my un-curated self. By translating online social media experience into a tangible form, via performance and installation, From URL To IRL investigates contemporary notions of vulnerability and privacy.