Molly Soda

Soda uses social media as her practice and medium. It’s a provocative unpacking of the digital avatar, self-representation and our ownership of it, also the friction between online representation and IRL.  I like her embracing of vulnerability, and making a “high-art” out of this ‘low culture’ movement.

“Soda explores the technological mediation of self-identity, contemporary feminism, culture and perversion” www.annkakultys.com/artists/molly-soda/

In Dobson’s Postfeminist Digital Cultures, she speaks of the cringe-worthiness of female self-representation in social media, and how this is an idea that comes from the patriarchy and is limited to female (or non-cis-male) self-representation. “Their media practices and self-productions are framed as cringe-worthy, as well as risky or dangerous, and these deficiencies are often implicitly constructed as a weakness of their sex.”

Soda’s work embraces and inflates the ideas of insecurity and vanity driving digital representation. Her movement between the vulnerable and the TMI probes the online culture of over-sharing, sympathy and empathy. the evolution of relationships comes into question - with the idea of the digital avatar being a curated version of yourself, and many of your relationships existing online, what happens to real relationships when the road to intimacy is stunted by the screen and these acts of “vulnerability” in real life would lead to closer relationships, but online lead to what exactly? an attention-grabbing device? A curated emotional self and a false sense of connection in this inherently disconnected type of life. 


Using the selfie in my work is representational of this IRL vs Digi-Self. I. Absolutely. Hate. Selfies. Using these in my work is a struggle and embarrassing for me. The only way I can not cringe is to make them into monstrous and ugly versions of myself. I guess that’s saying something about my self-image and self-representation. Online, I don’t have any photos of myself that are taken by myself. The only photos I have are of other things, or photos that other people have taken of me. I feel that it is something difficult for me to show/make selfies, and that this difficulty is important in to unpack and explore especially in my work. I love that Soda and Calypso are making characters or extreme versions of herself, something that I can relate to by making monstrous depictions of myself. 

Most of these female self-representing artists are not able to take true to life images of themselves and call it art. There has to be some extreme or construct behind it.

Juno Calypso

Calypso works mainly in self-portraits, or ‘selfies’. She uses a character Joyce to portray a laboured construct of femininity.

I am drawn to her work mainly for the segmentation of the female body she portrays. She uses omnidirectional mirrors to create a multi-angled and dismembered view of the female form.

Berger critiques the interplay between the gaze of viewer, artist, and nude. Mirrors are the classic symbol of  the ‘vain feminine’, harking back to mythological representations. The idea of the gaze of the viewer and the nude, the nude existing to be looked at, the nude staring off, allowing herself to be looked at, or looking at herself in a mirror.

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her,” wrote Berger, “Put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”

I am curious in the evolution of this interplay of the gaze.  How do the power dynamics shift when the subject/nude becomes the artist? Calypso’s work has been tied to the idea of the ‘looped gaze’, the idea of …..”the feeling of attraction and alienation when seeing yourself through your image in the social media age.”

But also the confusing loop of representation and (being/sense of self) ….. that the female (and everyone really) sits in right now. To portray sexuality is applauded or condemned, selfies are vain but they represent the ownership of our own self-image. Women now have the ability to be completely in charge of our own image, but the pressures of media, culture, reality means that this space is continuously oscillating between exploitation, narcissism and empowerment.

The feminine ideal and the constructed feminine are stimulating ideas emanating from Calypso’s work. As self-portraits, the idea of the constructed self-image leads us to also question the idea of the constructed online digital personality/avatar. Leah Schrager and Molly Soda delve further into these ideas. 

David Spriggs

Funnily enough, both David Spriggs and Nakanishi’s works were shown to me after I made my work. The similarities of ideas that present through form, and the contrasting theory that present through use of subject are pretty extreme. Time and movement in these works are the essential ideas - the illusion and physicality of time and the movement of the viewer in space.


“David Spriggs’s works are wonders in movement. They make you move.” (Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement Art, Philosophy p143). The idea that aligns with me is the viewer looking at the form in the plexiglass to try and recognise the object. Putting the viewer into action - having to move around the sculpture in order to find out what it is and to realise its effects. Highlighting the illusion inherent in vision and perception through forcing movement on the viewer.


“The force of Perception”, seeing the plexiglass sheets are the ‘unmaking of perception’ . Allied to Boccioni’s concept of dynamic form, David Sprigg’s animate sculptures seem to create force lines for the emergence of perception. The Image composes itself through the force of a relational dynamic. All Vision works this way…. Stability is vision’s illusion. This paradoxical relation between the abstract and the concrete, between the virtual and the material, between the perceptible and the imperceptible, is at stake in each of Sprigg’s animate sculptures…. inviting us to move-with. (Manning)

Plastic dynamism is not simply how we see an object, but also how an object appears for our embodied perception.  “Plastic dynamism is the simultaneous action of the motion characteristic of an object (its absolute motion), mixed with the transformation which the object undergoes in relation to its mobile and immobile environment (its relative motion).” (Boccioni 1970a, 92)

So, perception is an illusion and everything that we see through our eyes isn’t what we see. Our brains are just reading into the vision signals that it receives. Contemplating  these mechanics and techniques that happen inside your brain and experience, and the mimicry of this in inventions like cinema, or the power of technology to use the illusory capabilities of the brain and the functioning of the body.

Nobohiro Nakaniski

Nakanishi Inkjet-printed photos on plexiglass acrylic, sequences of photos of landscapes and the environment placed in chronological order in a layered, multi-dimensional view.

The construction and presentation of the images is very elegant, something that I would strive for in my work. The layering is effective in bringing a multi-dimensional view from many different perspectives.

“We are all subject to the passing of time, yet each of us feels and perceives it in our own way,” says Nakanishi, “Time itself has no shape or boundary and cannot be fixed or grasped. When we look at the photographs in these sculptures, we attempt to fill in the gaps between the individual images. We draw from our physical experiences to fill in missing time and space, both ephemeral and vague. In this series, I attempt to depict time and space as sensations shared by both viewer and artist.” https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/06/layer-drawings/

I find his comparing this layering technique to time, similar to my thinking. The Layering of still frames allows the viewer to step through or see visually the time in film, the time in photography. The layering transfers the dimension of time from  animation and movement, into one that is physical and simultaneous. Nakanashi emphasises the viewer’s automated attempts to fill in the gaps between still frames, the missing time and space. This response to still frames in succession, is something that is ingrained in us from the illusory techniques of cinema.

Nakanishi takes the photographs over an extended period of time, placing them in a succession, whereas I have taken one filmed moment of time and printed the 24 frames per second of still frames. If watched on TV, this ‘moment’ would be a succession of still frames that had the illusory power to bring movement and time. When printed out in succession the illusion of cinema is gone and what is in its place? 

The illusion is implied perhaps, or the illusion is highlighted. The optical magic of cinema is still present though in a divergent way. The viewer can focus on their own movement, being now in a position to be an agent in the film viewing experience/spectacle.

Critical Annotation 2

My interest remains in film based work that deals with jolting the viewer from their cinematic expectation, however, I am further developing this idea to focus on the viewer experience of film/the screen and ways to manipulate the viewers’ physical, physiological and psychological response. This has led to an exploration of the physiology and psychology of memory and an investigation into the evolution of the memento.


I am very interested in the subversion that can be created by technology playing the person -

a great analogy for digital culture today. In the work of Korac and Lopes, the machine plays the human arm - a subversion of autonomy and a great starting point to begin unpacking where these ideas can lead.


I am still interested in the idea of the camera mimicking the human experience, and ways that I can lead the viewer into recreating these actions.  I am developing ways to interact and play the viewer, more ways of involving the viewer in the cinematic experience. Lindsay Seers places the viewer inside the ‘head’, mimicking the camera/human experience. Hoang Tran Nguyen explores human participation, reaction and potential with their karaoke machine based on our learned behaviour of karaoke.


The theorists I have been reading deal with cinematic language and the crossover between film and experience. Mindscreen, by Kawin deals with the subjective camera, the physical eye and the mind’s eye these modes of representation in cinema have inspired me to think more deeply about the possible affects of the camera, as an extension of the body/mind, or as in mindscreen suggests - a possible representation of the camera’s own mind - the amorphous nature of the camera being very prevalent in my previous work and something that I would like to pursue further. What happens to the viewer when placed in this scenario? There is a tension between the auteurs/artist’s vision, the protagonist’s vision and the audience's vision when using first person camera/POV shots. I would like to explore this further and experiment with this idea especially in a framework of reflexive mimesis and physiology.


My practice has expanded in the last couple of months based on a collection of souvenirs, maps and memorabilia that I inherited from my old neighbour. The collection of tangible objects compared to my paper trail is one aspect that I am exploring.


The idea of the collection, memorabilia and the value of objects versus the modern day quandary of valuing the abstract.  The idea of all of our information/memories being lost at some point into a digital void is scary to me. and it has happened to me, the broken iPhone that I displayed having a wealth of pictures from my European travels but unable to get at it easily without doing some sort of computer shop thing. the tactility of these objects really made me think about the evolution of memory and human interaction - the sensory experience the idea of cataloguing and valuing the object have been areas of research. Patrick Pound, Mark Dion, Christian Boltanski practice investigates the memento, tangible recollection and the archive.


I have been interested in sensory memory and the stimulus that we can get from a digital device. The haptic echoic - tactility being lost in this evolution of information. what is lost though? as we realise more often that emotions, good and bad, are stored more in the body, what does this mean in the long term for sensory memory and the human experience in general?  The psychological benefits from things like social media, text versus real human interaction are proven to be null and void… where is society heading?

Nam June Paik's says it eloquently - ‘technology is becoming the new interface’. This questions the technology/screen as a human experience, as a new interface and the tactility of the digital. Tacita Dean is an example of morphing these ideas together.  Her obsession with film as a medium and relic and her collections of nostalgic/obsolete technologies interweaves these two trajectories.


These two ideas that I am exploring parallel the same main objective; the dichotomy between the real and virtual, and the evolution of this.