Mapping the Invisible: Self-Portrait — Map of Lucas’s Online Self

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For my self-portrait map, I wanted to make something that in some way addressed Katie Holland Lewis’ Tangled Pathways, in which Lewis documented physical sensations on an abstract grid that represented specific parts of her body. I was drawn to its accumulative structure and its gestalt-like presentation of individual moments.

Through that piece, she found a clever way to distill and render a multitude of experiences into one visual space, and it ends up implying a certain amount of acquired agency over those experiences. I wanted to attempt a similar method, but instead of collecting data about physical experiences, I chose to use my online profile as the foundation.

What I ended up doing was taking each of my profile pictures since I’ve been at Sarah Lawrence and tracing various distances between me and notable elements in the frame. Within each picture, I tried to alter my methodology of tracing slightly to fit what I considered to be its theme. For instance, in my profile picture that utilized datamoshing glitch techniques, I dragged lines from me to certain stray pixels in a somewhat random fashion. As well, the background of one of my profile pictures is lit while I’m in silhouette, so I created an even tracing around my head to signify this.

When I composite all of them together, the result is nothing that could really be read, but instead serves as an all-encompassing representation of my different attempts at representing myself online, which in itself is somewhat daunting of a task, and futile to really do completely accurately. I’d consider it a map in the sense that I’ve set up a system for myself to display factual information, but the fact that I only keep that system to myself, and don’t include a legend, takes the attention off of the information itself and instead calls attention to its accumulation. Thus, what it makes visible is not the specific moments themselves, but rather the result of a build-up of their existence.

Author: Lucas Lacamara