Jennifer Dalton Talks Social Media Consumption

This is the second in a series of interviews with artists, writers, and personalities involved with #TheSocialGraph, which opens today (November 12, 6-9p). For more information, visit hyperallergic.com/thesocialgraph.

Jennifer Dalton stepped right into the heart of New York’s social media art movements when she, along with artist William Powhida, organized #Class at the Winkleman Gallery earlier this year. The exhibition was as much a social media event producing a constant stream of Facebook content, Twitter conversations, livestreams, and Flickr images, as a IRL one.

Since then she has completed “What Are We Not Shutting Up About? (Five Months of Status Updates and Responses from Jerry Saltz’s Facebook [Profile] Page)” (2010), which she exhibited this past summer at the FLAG Art Foundation. I interviewed her in July about that social media profile turned art work and she talked about the reasons she makes art, which she says is:

… for the same reason I think many artists do, which is that we hope for other people to see the world in the same way we do so we might feel less alone.

… and why New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz’s profile page has become a very active subculture in the city’s art world:

I think what people crave is dialogue and community, and Saltz’s page has become a mecca for that.

When I asked her to include “What Are We Not Shutting Up About … ” in #TheSocialGraph it was for many reasons but most notably because it beautifully demonstrates one of many art communities that have emerged online. This online village (of roughly 5,000 people) has its own culture and is symptomatic of the ways people who aren’t tech geeks are using social media to interact with one another and share ideas, which inadvertently influence their work (even if it isn’t as directly as in Dalton’s case).

I spoke to her yesterday (Thursday, November 11) after she installed the work at Outpost, and we discussed how her views of the work may have changed and what she thinks about social media … her first reaction was “douchebag.”

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