Experiment # 6 (six): Myspace portrait series (2004 - present)

Everyone is a star on Myspace or Facebook. Personal information is generously send into the world. Users are unveiling themselves to strangers as they were best friends. The myspace portrait series is accentuating just that.

Portraits are made from users of the community site Myspace. Each painting goes together with a short portrait film, mounted with information gathered from the user's page: an extra dimension to the idea of portraying.
Surprising is the uniformity of users on portrait: as they want to distinguish themselves, they become banal. Extravagance is a real normality amongst the users of Myspace.
Therefore the accompanying video has been added. This way of contemporary portraying not only shows some physical features of the person, it also offers the viewer additional information such as name, age, occupation, location,.. but also extras such as comments from friends, movie choices, intentions,...
We are currently living in an information world where complete anonymity will become scarce. Many are “known” on the web and create their proper personality between the boundaries of the net. Still, paradoxically, with all the information we receive about others, due to the overwhelming quantity, people remain anonymous. We are lost in the mass.





Users tend to mentally expose themselves to the outer world. The accuracy of this information, however, is doubtful. But even when the given information is wrong, it tells something about the actual state of mind of the world we're living in. This people's behavior is directly connected with today's celebrity culture. Due to user-generated Internet content, people tend to represent themselves as who they would like to be, not who they actually are. Everyone is a star on Myspace or Facebook. An intriguing aspect of the phenomena is for example that a beginning rock band is shown in the same conditions as let's say Radiohead or the Rolling Stones. Everyone begins with the same possibilities. That feeling transmits an unseen personal confidence, existing in that specific part of youth culture.

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www.myspace.com/leroyplusleroy