New Work: Tagged 3.0 & Tagged 4.0

Well, hello. Fancy you showin’ up. Come here often? No? That’s my fault, I’m a terrible poster. But that will change.

So hi. I’m going to talk about two works, Tagged 3.0 and Tagged 4.0. And yes, when you say the titles out loud, you would say, “tagged three point oh” and “tagged four point oh”. Tagged 3.0 and Tagged 4.0 are the third and fourth ‘generation’ of work I’ve been making with the Facebook tag as a unit of construction. You can read a post about Tagged and Tagged 2.0 by clicking here.

When I created Tagged 2.0, it was a natural idea for me to name the pieces Tagged 2.0 after the possibly annoying phrase Web 2.0 (though I love when BJ Novak says “web two point oh” in The Office). So it wasn’t at all odd to me that my next piece would be called Tagged 3.0. I wanted to make something large and beautiful with the Facebook tags. After making Tagged 2.0, I knew that size no longer played an issue. I was no longer confined to the size of a computer screen.

Tagged 3.0
2008
paper
each square is 1 3/4″ squared (4.46cm squared)
38” x 30” (96.5cm x 76.2cm

Tagged 3.0 reveals the quiet beauty of the Internet. I think that the reference to Facebook is much more subtle than in previous work and therefore the piece begins to start its own dialogue.

The piece strays away from questions like, “Who are you tagging?” and “Is that a real picture”? Through my artwork, I’ve discovered that the Internet has a sharp and rigid design, both visually and physically. Tagged 3.0 is a nice example of my idea.

Tagged 4.0
2008
paper
each square is 1 3/4″ squared (4.46cm squared)
13″ x 12″ x 12″ (33.0cm x 30.5cm x 30.5cm)

So it was time to stop ‘hanging’ around (pun on the fact that all three previous Tagged works hang on walls) and create Tagged 4.0. The work is a more traditional three-dimensional object that strikingly contradicts the image of Tagged 3.0.

I think Tagged 4.0 also reveals my ideas about a linear Internet, but rather than show it in silence, the piece is loud and aggressive. I like that the piece shows an organized chaos, which imitates Facebook’s often crazy relationship with its users. It’s also neat to finally see the Facebook tag in a position other than against a wall.

The tags jumble all over each other, trying to get into this and that position, perhaps mirroring the social climbing and disarray found all over Facebook. The viewer can walk around the sculpture, thoroughly investigating the dense block of tags that somehow manages to be light and airy. While the tags exist in a physical space, they somehow keep an ephemeral quality, as if still stuck online.