An art exhibition surveys how digital culture has changed the way we portray ourselves - and how others see us
Between the snapshot sharing on Facebook and Twitter and the manipulated images of Photoshop, Kathy Cleland wonders what digital is doing to our collective identity.
The Australian from Sydney University is the curator of "Face to Face: Portraiture in a Digital Age", an exhibition opening tomorrow at 6pm at the Chulalongkorn University Art Centre.
It's not so much about what modŽern technology can do as about how viewers engage and interact with it.
Cleland has assembled the work of 14 Australian artists - digital phoŽtos, videos and installations - to assess shifting perceptions in human identity.
"The plasticity of the digital image, with its ability to be endlessly manipulated and transformed, is particularly suited to the exploration of contemporary postmodern notions of identity as fluid, fragmented and multiple," Cleland notes in the show's catalogue.
"New digital media and communication technologies have also opened up new arenas for audience engagement and interaction. Today portraits proliferate not just in galleries and photo albums but also on mobile phones, computers and the Internet.
"Popular image sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are becoming the 21st century's new public galleries, where previously private images are now distributed globally."
The exhibition, Cleland says, has "poignant video portraits, computer-animated talking heads, idealised images and avatars, digital faces that are fractured, morphed and transformed, and your own image captured and displayed before your eyes as a visual timeline of continually changing portraits".
The participating artists are Michele Barker, Anna Munster, Denis Beaubois, Daniel Crooks, Anna Davis, Jason Gee, Emil Goh, Angelica Mesiti, Adam Nash, Mami Yamanaka, David Rosetzky, Rechel Scott, Stelarc and John Tonkin. the window
to the soul
* "Face to Face" is at the Chulalongkorn Art Centre until October 16, Monday to Friday from 9 to 7 and Saturdays until 4.
* The gallery is on the seventh floor of university's Centre of Academic Resource.
* Call (02) 218 2965.