11,440 Selfies

11,440 Selfies is a composite work aggregated from 3 years of harvesting more than 10 million selfies from the Internet. Each photograph was sorted by brands, gestures, objects and tonality and then hand placed into a massive 68GB composite work; arranged to imitate computer technology in data mining and its creation of large data sets.

The number, 11,440, represents 15 seconds of selfies uploaded to the web; from the estimated 24 billion that are uploaded every year. The work represents a tiny segment in the continuous flow of images constantly being uploaded to the Internet from people from all over the world.

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From these amassed images, surprising repeating patterns emerged – people posing with cash or guns; or holding a specific brand, like a Starbucks or a Coke. Patterns of gestures also appeared within specific selfie hashtags, such as the ‘mirror selfie’ hashtag, like raising an arm to flex or putting a leg up on the bathroom counter, demonstrating how diverse we are and yet similar in elemental human behavior. Sometimes a person who had photographed themselves hundreds of times kept appearing from the download of images, and they, too, are grouped together. Similar to how a data company sorts individuals into categories, large segments of these repeating patterns are grouped throughout the work and function as data points in the stream of information we ourselves put out into the world; ready to be analyzed and replayed to us in ways that can alter the course of history.