Be good or be good at it

Abstract

This thesis accompanies a body of artwork that investigates and recontextualizes the unparalleled coming of age as a queer and trans person during the boom of social media, including platforms such as Facebook, Twitter (now X), Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, Myspace, and Pinterest. My work builds a space for communication and connection to form and accept a merging and separation of the online persona/personas that exist alongside and in contrast to one’s physical world persona, showcasing the importance of both and how my generation has come to understand ourselves and how we present ourselves. My thesis work mainly focuses on Tumblr as it was the most impactful for the identities and subcultures I belong to, by developing pieces that recontextualize Tumblr as a trans technology and provide an understanding of the new coming-of-age frontier in two spaces, the physical and digital worlds. Both spaces have social norms, languages, and means for performance and display. Separating the two and/or diminishing one world for the other can damage and strip people of communities and spaces that allow them to feel they belong. The work created for this thesis is based on the photographic process and its ability to document, distort, and archive our existence through both the physical and digital world. I create photomosaic archives that explore the digital realm using various equipment, such as webcams, cell phones, cameras, and more. Paintings, videos, and sculptures are integrated into and amongst the photographic work to act as an architectural passage into the physical world and merge the physical and digital world through the work directly. Poems round out this body of work as images and words are never a substitute for one another but rather benefit from existing in tandem. Social media platforms reflect the importance of this relationship between words and images, as all platforms I have listed above exist in one way or another as a pairing of words and pictures. Attempting to uncouple words from images in the context of the internet would do a disservice to my work and to the physical experience of being a human.