Artist Statement
Status Symbols: A Study in Tweets


Status Symbols is a series of virtual portraits that are studies of identity in the digital age of social media. Textual updates on sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow for virtual personas to be created with the prodding of, “What are you doing?” or “What’s on your mind?” at the direction of the social networks. Status Symbols showcases the virtual identities created from these self-scripted self-portraits. Abstract portraits are created with spinning LEDs that translate written words into flashing bursts of light in the computer’s language of binary code. Custom hardware and software are used to transform the text into ons and offs of binary code. Each portrait represents a fleeting moment of identity in the digital world. Process Statement
My set-up to create Status Symbols, consists of 8 RGB LEDs and an Arduino microcontroller. Each individual tweet, which becomes the portrait, is turned into a computer program that controls the blinking of the 8 LEDs. Each character in the tweet becomes a string of ones and zeros/ons and offs for the camera. The LED-array is set to spin and long exposures capture the moving blinks of the LEDs on film, creating the portrait.

 

 

Lori Hepner is a conceptually based fine art photographer whose series Status Symbols is a new look at portraiture though individuals’ updates on Twitter. Lori’s work has been exhibited Carnegie Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Duke University, Silver Eye Center for Photography, the 2011 Lishui International Photography Festival in Lishui, China, and a traveling exhibition in Spain of 12 photographers from the 2010 PhotoEspaña Festival. Most recently, she was chosen as a Selected Photographer, one of 35 from the US, in the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward 12. Lori earned an MFA in Digital Media at RISD (2005) and a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology (2003). She currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA where she is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State University.

 

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