Portraits by invited artists to Julia Kay’s Portrait Party

April 29th, 2010 • Au fil des rencontres, Julia Kay's Portrait Party, Moi Numérique
Tags: Digital self, iPhone art, JKPP, Moi Numérique, Moi-Je, Portraits

In Julia Kay’s Portrait Party, one has to make a portrait, drawn or paint, of all other invited artists, so far 155 from over the world. In few words: you paint everyone and everyone else paints you. These are, so far, the many portraits of me can be found in my Flickr galleries at http://www.flickr.com/photos/margaperez/galleries/

I’m also a STARR: Tell me whom you walk with and I’ll tell you who you are

December 29th, 2008 • 7 comments Moi Numérique, Moi-Je par soi-même, Pourquoi ça n'arrive qu'à moi?, Technologies sociales
Tags: Allaitement, Autoportraits, Breastfeeding, Digital self, Femmes, Flickr, Moi Numérique, Moi-Je, Nu, rhiz08, Social Network Services, Social Software

In the field of the Eduserv workshop on digital identities, the 8th January 2009 at the British Library, Steven Warburton and Yishay Mor invited us to share small stories in which we are the main character (or at least a first-hand witness), and which we believe illuminates an interesting aspect, or dilemma, of digital identity.

A few have been collected already : about disaggregated identities, about the pressure of existing within a Twitter community, about students hands-in-hands friends in FB with teachers, about the impact of an online identity in online job search, and also about the exposure of a teenager photo by a counsellor without a full understanding of of CC licences. Yishay also prepared a short presentation that provides guidance to the task with the STARR template.

Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres!

And because, I’m also a STARR, here is my story: Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres! This is a Spanish saying my mother repeated me to death when I was a teenager. Literally translated into English, it will be: Tell me whom you walk with and I’ll tell you who you are. But the saying translated into another form would be:

• Hunt with cats and you catch only rats
• Birds of a feather flock together
• A man is known by the company he keeps

S/Situation

I have a Flickr account, since 2004. I have always used for both personal and professional aspects of my real persona. I also have a Flickr account for my avatar, Paz Lorenz, since 2006. I use sets and collections to separate personal and professional content. But also to separate different parts of my personal life. I don’t want my self-portraits mixed with my kids. In this first account, I haven’t really engaged in rich conversations with other Flickr users. I didn’t feel the need to complete my profile, I have only 33 contacts, most of them real life friends and belong to a few groups, mainly related with spontaneous and brutal art. Opposite to Paz who maintains a richer social life and spends her time flickering.

My accounts are frequently aggregated by other users who make me their contact. Some of my photos are added as a favorite, and commented. As a consequence, a part of me is automatically added to other people’s profiles and photostreams: I appear in the list of contacts of a given user. My photos appear in the users’ favorite collection, associated, out of context, with other photos, according to a criteria I don’t necessarily perceive or understand.

T/Task

My problems started with a photo that my older son, Sariel, took of me, while breastfeeding my newborn Forest. In one year, ‘Happy breastfeeding’ was seen 3,464 times. My photo started as a project against people who complain because of breastfeeding in public places, after two awful encounters where I’ve been told to ‘stop doing that there”, even though it was discrete and I had a scarf over the head of my one month old baby.

As an answer, I wanted to replicate a photo of another Flickr user that unfortunately isn’t public whose title is ‘For you pervs out there. . .’ In this photo a mother of a toddler is breastfeeding her child, while she gives ‘fuck you’ sign straight to the camera. The photo, as many other of the kind, is published in the Go fuck yourself Flickr group. So I wanted to do the same: nurse not so discreetly while looking straight into the eye of those people who condemn breastfeeding in public and be rude and angry. But this was impossible with my little clown taking the photo. We couldn’t be serious and didn’t help but laughing out loud. And the result was this:

Since, the photo has been marked as a favorite by many ‘pervs’ who maintain fake Flickr accounts where they do not post any photo, but where they collect other users photos showing nudity, partial nudity like mothers breastfeeding showing part of her breasts or children without Tshirts playing in the nature by a hot summer. Suddenly my photo and I appeared associated to pornography, among the contacts and in the collection of users who are also member of ‘Mature women nudes’ and ‘Delicious oral sex’, just to cite the less offensive groups.

A/Action

When I realised that this was happening, I defined a personal rule regarding my content in Flickr: to block any contact or fan of my photos who is associated with pornography: publishes porn photos, belongs to porn groups, has porn favorites or invites one of my photos to a porn pool.

R/Results

I systematically monitor accounts of people who establish any virtual relationships with me in Flickr, and if not compliant, I block.

As a consequence, and to remain those who do not know how blocking functions in Flickr, these users:

• Can’t comment on my photos (All comments on my photos made by them are deleted)
• Can’t comment on my sets (All comments on my sets made by them are deleted)
• I am removed as theirs (They can’t add me as a contact again)
• Can’t add my photos as favorites anymore (Any of my photos marked as their favorites are removed)
• Can’t blog my photos
• Can’t add notes or tags
• Can’t send me FlickrMail

This obliges me to follow up my social activity closely, as I don’t want to be associated or to have my 4 kids associated with these people. Naturally, I could have set my collection to private contacts or friends-only. But I don’t want this. I want a public collection of photos. And ‘Happy breastfeeding’ is my provocative public statement on breastfeeding.

Not directly related, I also don’t tag my children’s pics, so they are not overexposed. And the titles in general are name+date. I changed most of them to be only accessible by contacts and left only the portraits for the public eye.

R/Reflections

The main realisation was that there is a time consumption issue associated with the management of private-public content on the Internet. Most of the mothers who put their children photo on Flickr are subject to this kind of problem, and yet one faces a dilemma between restricting photos to friends only or deploying strong policies for control of interaction around one’s images. Hence users develop their own strategy to control these issues, like:

• using FlickrMails in a chain between mothers to investigate the good intentions of a certain Flickr user. Followed by massive blocking and reporting abuse.

• using one’s profile to explain what type of interaction policy is suitable for one’s account. Like another of my contacts who states in her profile:

“my pics tells about love and sharing, proximity between parents and child, nothing sexual in it i precise!!! i DO NOT wish my pics to be added as favs on people’s account who are looking for erotic or porn aspect , neither be added as contact i am therefore very happy to share my pics with people respectful to that opinion, motherhood is pure… thanx!”

I became more aware of certain threats that have an impact on my digital reputation. The ENISA Position Paper No.1 Security Issues and Recommendations for Online Social Networks was an enlightning read that increased my understanding and awareness of these issues.

Twitter, à force d’en boire, ça me gave un peu quand même!

October 28th, 2008 • 1 comment Technologies sociales
Tags: Être mère, Moi Numérique, Moi-Je, Pourquoi ça n'arrive qu'à moi ?, Technologies sociales, Twitter

Ce billet fait suite, avec 10 mois d’intervalle, à Twitter! je ne boirai jamais de ton eau et pourtant…

Ce soir, un tweet d’un contact the Cristina Costa m’a attrapée dans On twitter: par D’arcy Norman ‘I deleted my twitter account. After posting almost 11,000 tweets over a year and a half. And I don’t miss it. I don’t regret it.’

Tout comme D’arcy, moi aussi j’ai envie de passe à l’acte, de tout virer. Basta, fini les tweets. Fuera de mi vida Twitter! Mais j’hésite encore.

Au fil des mois, Twitter s’est développé comme une fenêtre ouverte sur mon quotidien. Pour chuchoter que je suis fatiguée d’être mère, d’être seule pendant la semaine, de galérer à mort, de ne pas avoir le temps de moi. Comme si soudain, une audience virtuelle m’accompagnait dans mon train-train de tous les jours. Une fenêtre ouverte aux doutes, aux peurs, à la culpabilité, à la revendication de mon statut de mère de famille nombreuse et professionnel à temps complet, qui se bât, seule, contre la folie, le suicide, l’abandon ou la fuite. Le tout, en beauté, minimaliste, sobre et fragile: je n’ai pas envie d’agacer ma communauté. Encore moins que quelqu’un des services sociaux se pointe à ma porte en m’accusant de schizophrène perdue dans la reconstruction délirante d’un monde sans bruits, ni cris d’enfants.

Aussi Twitter m’ouvre la voie de la veille aléatoire. J’arrête d’ouvrir mon agrégateur de fils RSS. Je me laisse dire ce qu’il y a de bien à lire. D’autres filtrent pour moi. En plus, mon moi social trouve aussi un moyen d’action pour le bien commun. Je partage nouvelles, trouvailles et astuces. Je suis utile à ma communauté. Twitter c’est bien. TwitterFox, trop cool. Et je m’amuse à agencer des canaux de communication de groupe pour mes projets: http://twitter.com/mvn08 et http://twitter.com/rhiz08 Le max!

Mais Twitter aussi est prise de tête. Et j’en ai ras le bol des moi-je du micro-blogging:

• des hyperprésents: « Morning Twitterverse! », tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet…
• des ‘egotwistical’ de l’egobranding à outrance: “Again another blog post by ME”, “Look at my fantastic presentation in Slideshare”, “Download my last article!”, “My project is just what you need”, or “Googlescholar me and you’ll find that I’m a reference in the subject”.

J’en ai surtout marre de la culture de l’apparence, de Twitter comme pince recourbe cils du moi numérique: suis-je belle? et vous?

Je porte la mort en moi et la vie

October 29th, 2007 • Moi Numérique
Tags: Autoportraits, Bleu, Corps, Enfants, Femmes, Moi Numérique, Moi-Je, Mort, Nu, Photo, Poésie, Vie

Silencios

La muerte siempre al lado. Escucho su decir. Sólo me oigo.

Alejandra Pizarnik, Los trabajos y las noches

Crâne presque chauve et grisonnant…la quarantaine approchant!

July 29th, 2004 • 1 comment Pourquoi ça n'arrive qu'à moi?
Tags: , Moi-Je, Photo

A l’occasion de la fête des mères, je suis allée chez le coiffeur en quête d’une coupe été anti-sable, anti-poux et anti-nœuds pour Inès. Entre café et thé, magazines people, magazines de mode, de coupes, échantillons de couleur et 4 bons miroirs bien placés ; les conditions étaient réunies pour complexer…

- Ma coupe est nulle, faites-moi quelque chose pour changer, je n’en sais rien une couleur par exemple… - Ne vous inquiétez pas Mme Pérez, je vais vous faire… une couleur, une coupe… Vous allez voir : je sais faire !

Six heures après, trois décolorations, deux couleurs, une dizaine de coupes progressives, je demandais à cris la tondeuse.

- Mais Mme Pérez vous n’êtes pas psychologiquement préparée pour porter les cheveux courts. - Faites !