New Work: Tagged & Tagged 2.0

Well, hello.  Have you friended someone on Facebook today?  The two series of works I will be describing in this post reveal my obsession with the online social networking site called Facebook. 

2008
paper and pins on cardboard
each white square is 1 3/4″ squared (4.46cm squared)
dimensions vary

When I was enrolled at Carnegie Mellon, I vividly remember setting up my Facebook account on my wireless laptop in the middle of campus on a cool fall afternoon.  I remember it clearly because for several months, I was adamant about jumping in, but by the fall of 2004, a few of my trendsetting and technology-driven fraternity brothers encouraged me to join ‘the new hotness’.  I remember thinking that I was already connected to everyone I needed to be connected to and that I didn’t care about connecting with strangers.  I was wired enough with required computer courses, uploading electronic art assignments via File Transfer Protocols (FTP), and wireless Internet on campus.

Unlike most people who use Facebook today, I am one of the few percent of users who have been using the site since it’s early conception.  I may not be one of the first five hundred Harvard students, but I have been using the site for four years—that’s a long time.  The other day, my Syracuse buddy thought it was weird how I’ve been on Facebook for that long—she only joined last year!  And another friend of mine just joined.  Where have you been, people?!

Like most long-term relationships, there’s bound to be a bit of turmoil.  Over the course of the four years, I’ve changed my profile pic nearly one hundred times, cheated on Facebook with MySpace, and deactivated several key features of my account including the profile Wall.  If you’re not a Facebooker, or even an online social networker, the previous sentence may sound like complete gibberish.  What’s important to understand is that I had real-world anxiety because of virtual problems that ultimately lead me to misuse Facebook.  Online, there are no rights or wrongs, just good or bad design, and I believe that Facebook was and is designed brilliantly.  But for me as a crazy bag man, I was uncomfortable with the amount of my identity that was being poured into a publicly viewable site, so I tried to control it by basically being an introvert on a social application.

This entire back-story is a great lead up to my work I would like to explain.  In Facebook, you create a profile with several items that include a personally uploaded picture, personal contact information, and any information you’d like to provide regarding your favorite interests like books, movies, and music.  When it comes to pictures, Facebook introduced a cool feature called ‘tagging’. 

Tagging is the process of marking something in a picture with a label—99% of the time the user tags a person.  So let’s say you uploaded a pic of you and your best friend at the mall drinking Jamba Juice.  Facebook allows you to label stuff in the picture, kind of like making a real-life scrapbook page with a caption of the people in the photograph.  When a user hovers the mouse over an individual’s face in the pic, a label pops up that is usually the name of the person.  The label can be anything, even like “The Best Drink” when hovering over the cup of Jamba Juice.

My work comes into play with the design of the tag.  Below the pic is a list of the items the user tagged.  The caption begins, “In this photo:” and then lists the labels, like “Me, John Doe, The Best Drink”.  When the mouse hovers over each label in the caption, the magic occurs.  A small square frame appears on the pic to identify the label.  I’ve taken two screenshots—one is the image you see on Facebook and the other is the tag frame that appears if you were to hover the mouse over my name:

And here’s what happens when you hover over Rebecca’s name:

Because Rebecca is the user that tagged the pic, she has the ability to place the tags anywhere she wants and label the tags however she wants.  If she wanted to, she could have placed the tag frame over my penis instead of my face, but either way, the square frame always stays the same size.  In fact, Facebook introduced multiple user tagging, so if Rebecca allowed it, anyone could tag anyone or anything in the pic.  The label is almost always a hyperlink as well, so by clicking on Rebecca’s name, I would be directed to her profile page.

So I’ve described the idea of tagging—who cares?  Well, I think it’s totally an online activity that messes with my mind.  I used to upload pics and tag my friends left and right.  I was obsessed.  I see that obsession in my friends’ profiles now.  I see how important tagging has become and how obsessive it can be.  With Tagged, I decided to take the tags on existing pictures from the web to real-life.  The tag square is a simple design element that speaks loudly.  It gives the tagger the power to identify things within a pic.  I recreated the tag frame in Photoshop, printed several of the frames on a sheet of paper, cut out the frames, and pinned them to sturdy pieces of cardboard.

In Tagged, the cardboard is the same size as a typical pic on Facebook.  In fact, I basically held a piece of paper up to my monitor and traced the pic size.  Then, I would hover my mouse over each label and when the tag frame appeared, I traced its corners to mark its placement. Eventually I stopped tracing and simply created spontaneous compositions.  It’s pretty cool to see the pieces documented and put back on Facebook.  For fun, I tagged my friends in each piece and lined up each digital square frame exactly on top of the actual square frame.  Facebook me sometime and check it out, it’s pretty nifty!

I don’t believe that it’s important to know who or what is being tagged or even what the actual picture is.  I’ve simply titled each Tagged piece in the series as #1, #2, #3, etc.  I wanted to express my obsession with the process of tagging.  I also wanted to reveal that the process is a bit mindless—a bit blank, like the cardboard.  A friend mentioned that it really captures a feeling of my generation—the need for attention. Look at me, I’m tagging online, I’m doing something.  My work reveals that what I’m tagging is literally nothing.  The emphasis is on the tag itself and the process of tagging becomes more valuable than what is being labeled.

That brought me to Tagged 2.0, where I extended the size of the cardboard to something impossible to capture on Facebook, but still rooted in an online activity.  The extreme size of the ‘pic’ and the familiar image of the tag frame plays with the super Facebook fan’s learned knowledge.  The tag frames become vehicles for mark-making, playfully allowing the eyes to dance around the piece.  The title suggests a development in process or idea, as it references the web’s current state of existence as “Web 2.0” and the common upgrading that occurs with computer technology (“Upgrade to Version 10.4.1 today!”). 

The pieces are quiet and fun.  I have a piece hanging on my wall and it’s such a subtle reminder of my online identity and my constant struggle with “He who is Facebook”.  It might as well be a religion because I worship the platform that Facebook runs on yet I spite its firm hold on my being.  The fragility of each piece suggests a time-consuming reverence for a process that requires no thought.