The Space Between: the Virtual & the Physical

Social networking sites have always walked a difficult line between the realms of the public and private sphere. Users want to be public and private at the same time. They want to show off to the public that they have thousands of friends, yet also want to hide pictures of last night’s party from the girl who didn’t get invited. What is private and what is public? Students at Mount Holyoke College found this line unsettling when Holyoke senior Martha Martinez unveiled her controversial art installation “The Panopticon: A Facebook Installation” last month.

Martinez’s installation is a collection of printed photographs taken from Mount Holyoke students’ public albums posted on Facebook. These albums are accessible to anyone with a connection to the internet, whether they are Facebook members or not. However, upon seeing printed photos of themselves, some students were upset by the display.

As we are moving more towards interacting within the communal virtual space, we need something to pull us back to the physical space which our very bodies occupy. This art piece challenges us on what happens when something moves from a virtual communal space into a physical communal space with similar parameters.

What makes this physical space different from our virtual space? While students may have been angered by use of their picture without permission in this installment, who’s to say that some creepy old man in Arkansas didn’t print out his own copy of these public pictures to hang on his wall?

By posting a public picture on a network such as Facebook, a user is making it possibly accessible to millions of strangers, with little control on what is actually done with the picture. This does not upset students, who are used to this type of virtual public display. However, making the picture into a tactile document, something that can be touched, sniffed, or folded, displayed to only a few hundred students who happen to walk into the Mount Holyoke art gallery, causes uproar among the Mount Holyoke students. Why?

A physical object conveys a greater sense of documentation and permanence not achievable from a virtual file. Virtual files are easily amended: I can Photoshop an ice cream cone into someone’s hand, or put them in the middle of the African desert with a few clicks of the mouse. But once made physical, that sense of impermanence is lost. Now it is forever known that you once stood in the middle of the African desert with an ice cream cone in your hand. Similarly, I can delete a picture from my Facebook profile quite easily, but I cannot take a picture away from Martinez's hand as easily.

For a generation that needs to document their every move, event, thought, and feeling through virtual artifacts available to the virtual public, it seems odd that they would be so unsettled by something that offers to physically document their existence for them. True, it is for viewing in a different type of public space (the physical), but isn’t that what our generation wants? By posting their every move on the internet, they want the world to know that at one point in time, they took this picture at this precise moment. They want the world to know that they knew this person; they were friends with them, and they liked them so much they had dinner together. They want a public acknowledgement of their existence through comments, wall posts, and page views. By turning virtual memories into physical ones, by crossing the space between, their existence is made just a little bit more permanent. However, crossing this space still seems to violate an unspoken code between the virtual and physical world.