cybertiger
‘If we want to understand the nature of identity, we need to approach it by a different route; not in the timeless depths of our genes and brains, but in the flickering screen of the outside world, which acts as a constant mirror of identity. So the best thing is to start with the equally timeless question of who we really are’
Paul Verhaeghe, What about me? The Struggle for Identity in a Marked-Based Society.
As part of an ongoing research on online culture and identity representation in the context of social media, this project focuses on how identity is portrayed on dating apps, examining patterns, categories of images and references in the production of images.
The research explores how online platforms, offering a space for connection and visibility, have introduced complex mechanisms of image creation and self-representation. More specifically, in this project, I am examining the use of animal imagery—particularly tigers—on users’ account profile photos.
Images have been collected and catalogued to better understand their symbolism, structure and their visual composition. By analysing the repetitive gestures and patterns that appear in these images, and the presence of a specific animal within them, I am looking at the translation of references from the IRL into the online, in the framework of image production in dating-app.
Stereotypes, animal symbolism, and masculinity representations are translated into patterns of repetition and gestures from offline to online and vice versa.
‘[...] stereotyping is not restricted to the way in which any individual characterises and dismisses the threat of others, but is also typical of the way in which personal identity is constructed. The ‘I’, Barthes realised, ‘is not an innocent subject’. It is a complex interweaving of influences drawn from shared cultural knowledge, which is then naturalised as personal history, so that even the individual’s subjectivity has ultimately the generality of stereotypes’
Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast. Animal, Identity and Representation.
