I am not content: consequences of managing a likable female image in "onlife"
Pennington, Liv (2022) I am not content: consequences of managing a likable female image in "onlife". PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts/University of the Arts London.
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This doctoral inquiry undertaken between 2015 and 2022 investigates the following premise: Women have to be “likeable” to be seen, thus becoming “content” for social media. The investigation employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from the fields of visual arts, social media studies, political theory and feminist studies. At the outset of the research, Jodi Dean’s essay Communicative Capitalism: Circulations and the Foreclosure of Politics (2005), along with Luciano Floridi’s concept of ‘onlife’ (2012), serve as key catalysts with subsequent writings emerging from a constellation of material feminism used to elaborate critical thinking on LIKES and likability as a matter.
This research project employs the concept of “exhibition-as-chapter” (e-a-c), specifically designed for this inquiry. The aim is to drive material artistic experimentation to the fore, as a means to critically disrupt circulation. The e-a-c functions both as a system, and a method. In this approach I delve into the operative nature of the database, establishing a set of rules that physicalises the invisible instructions of the digital. The outcome is three e-a-c’s, that contribute to the creation of a fine-art practice that, whilst rooted in photography, combines with other mediums to draw attention to the developing situations of inequality and imbalance in the arts and wider public life for women artists.
The original contribution to knowledge lies in identifying and developing a theory of LIKES and likability as having material consequences, especially for women in 'onlife'. I propose that the concept of likability enables researchers to understand and interpret how women are engaged with as online content. Moreover, LIKES emerge as a significant characteristic of surveillance capitalist production, influencing contemporary art worlds, and shaping artists’ livelihoods. The final submission of complementary writing makes an original contribution to scholarship in the fields of expanded photography, visual art, and education, with additional impacts on feminist theory and philosophies of the body.
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