This is some brand new work. I've been asking friends of mine to compose and send me sext photos of themselves. So far it's been only people I know as I've been really interested in the awkwardness of the interaction when I solicit them for the pictures and how insecure I am about being perceived as slimy and creepy or feeling like I'm asking someone to do something that makes them uncomfortable. Which I am asking, but then I feel strange about it. Like a director who pressures an actress to do a nude scene that she later regrets. I feel less weird about soliciting guys for them because well, I am a guy I guess and I don't feel bad about exploiting them maybe. Maybe that's bullshit. But I'm interested in the process of getting them. But I'm also interested in sexts that people have sent as well as received in real-life scenarios as well as found images from the web which I know nothing about, but for now, these images are only the ones that were composed for me in the name of this project.
I'm interested in so many aspects of the sext message photo, but I think primarily these pictures are a study in courtship through digital medium and the tension between intimacy and distance that the digital medium of text messaging provides, in sext photos as equivalent to facefook "profile pictures" in the sense that they are images that attempt to succinctly define us in one idealized photo or twitter message that define us in one or two sentences and encourages snap judgments and vice versa. Our expectation that we'll be quickly judged and so our photos are modeled to a template that will grab readers with the first sentence. Mostly, I think I'm interested in how self-conscious and insecure these images are. They're profile pictures to the nth. Sext messages are used to, hopefully, sexually arouse the recipient and there is a desperation, a kind of poignancy to them. The male-to-female images are much different than the male-to-male images are much different than the female-to-male images and so on and so forth. I'm interested in how they are miscommunicated. Where they succeed and where they fail. I'm just kind of ranting now. But I think most of my work tends to be about a sort of ubiquitous misunderstanding. Or fear of perennial miscommunication and insecurity. Blah blah blah tell me what you think. They're organized in the order that I received them, not in any other way, though it is kind of interesting that they go from really safe to more exposed.
The images are really large, well, 24 x 32 or so, so if you can, save and open them and zoom in on them to see the image quality degradation. I'm not sure if you can do that here though. Can you? I'm sure I can upload them another way if you want or something. I don't know. I thought that enlarging them to this scale and revealing the bad quality of the images played with our idea of enlarging photos expecting to get more content or information, which we of course don't get when the quality is this poor. It's maybe similar to the kind of closeness and distance provided by sexts. In a way very distant and comfortable maybe and also still exposing and revealing in its easily wielded distribution and/or reproduction. Oh, and thanks, Hunter for the .gif tip. That and a few other things did pretty much exactly what I was hoping to do.
Just had an idea, not sure if it's interesting or not, but it might be interesting if I set it up somehow so that if someone were to choose to look at the images, the images would be forwarded to a random e-mail address or uploaded to a new site on the web or something. Or even just telling potential viewers that them looking at the pictures would result in their distribution. Would that stop them? I'm totally just thinking as I type.
Oh, also if you want to participate or know anyone who would for some reason, let me know or just tell them to text me or something. I definitely have a shortage on dudes at the moment. Initially, it was quite the opposite and then all the guys bailed.
