Me, My Wall and I: Selfie Culture and Public Space
Technoskeptic Magazine
In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell noted that the well-worn metaphor is a threat to self-expression. Easy to recall and use, phrases like Achilles heel or swan song obscure an author’s message with the “sheer cloudy vagueness” of ready-made thought. By plucking the low-hanging fruit of common metaphor, you can save yourself much mental effort, but “at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.”
Seventy years later, Orwell’s words carry fresh meaning. A new language of visual self-expression has formed around our mobile phones and the socially-networked cameras built into them. As is often the case with technology, new abilities beget new obligations. A mobile phone imbues every moment with the potential of interaction with real and imagined audiences. Constant connectivity has made each of us a wartime correspondent, filing dispatches to the loyal readers at home.
The lingua franca of this new connectivity is the selfie. New-media scholar Alise Tifentale sums it up as the “best version of #me: positive, happy, accomplished, proud, well-dressed (sometimes partly or completely undressed), seductive or sexy.” But the pressure to be always on and always attractive is changing how we interact with the world around us.
As selfies have evolved, so have the ways that we capture our #bestme. When front-facing cameras first debuted on mobile phones, selfie-takers experimented with the most flattering body and facial poses. Some trends, like the duck face look, were mercifully short-lived. Next came artificially smooth complexions as social media filters and photography apps allowed users to manipulate their digital images. Following photo manipulation, selfie-takers sought out real world spectacles that blended exclusivity with aesthetic glamour. Social media feeds were flooded with the international pop-up feast Diner en Blanc where guests descend on iconic locations dressed completely in white, or swimming pools brimming with rainbow sprinkles, available to those willing to pay the $40 admission to the roving “experiential installation” called the Museum of Ice Cream.
Yet the latest selfie trend may have the greatest impact on our non-digital lives. Murals and walls across the world are being painted specifically to attract selfie-takers in droves. These ready-made backgrounds, often commissioned by developers and retailers, use the lure of our own vanity (and a good selfie) to spread branded content to friends and families online. For the price of a brightly-colored backdrop, we surrender our social media feeds, identities, and creative agency to complete strangers. As a housekeeping note, any reference to “selfies” includes those instances where innocent third parties are pressed into service to take the photo, a particularly common occurrence with mural selfies.
Sponsored selfies are not an entirely new phenomenon. For as long as craft stores have carried mustaches-on-a-stick, photo booths with props and backdrops have been a mainstay of weddings, corporate parties, and other “sanctioned fun” events. But the latest iteration of this trend brings us closer to an Orwellian future where our online personas are carved out of someone else’s commercial ambitions. Like the well-worn metaphor, the readymade selfie obscures personal identity—not only for our social media followers, but for ourselves.
Public spaces are being repainted with murals designed to serve individual selfie-takers, subverting the community-focused needs that typically govern these spaces. The most common species of selfie mural is a pair of disembodied wings at shoulder height. Whether the wings are rainbow-hued or made of pepperoni pizza, the overall composition and effect is always the same, imbuing the subject of the photo with resplendent, outspread, possibly cheese-covered wings.
While Banksy and Shepard Fairey prove that graffiti artists occasionally find mainstream adoration, street art has traditionally been the bane of any municipality’s existence. Community murals may provide welcomed portrayals of local history, but unsanctioned art is regarded as a nuisance at best and the destruction of property at worst. Yet wing murals occupy an unnatural middle ground as street art for the selfie age: commercially-sanctioned marketing with a veneer of urban grit and rebellion. The murals are often commissioned by real estate developers, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and businesses seeking lucrative foot traffic and word-of-mouth advertising. If street art was once identified with local disenfranchised communities, wing murals are becoming a trademark of gentrifying neighborhoods.
A quick search of Instagram proves the ubiquity of wing murals across the US and world. Painted by different artists, they are united by a thin creative premise and aggressive hashtag promotion. They are increasingly common in blighted city areas undergoing “revitalization.” Real estate developers, looking to draw pedestrians and commercial investment, tap artists, galleries, and collectives to turn industrial walls into fractalized, neon-rich vistas.
The Gulch, a newly redeveloped and trendy neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee, is home to one of the most popular selfie murals in the US, created by Kelsey Montague (part of a series titled What Lifts You). A set of 30-foot wings unevenly scrawled in black and white, it is reminiscent of a teenager’s physics-class doodling. The Nashville Wings are a much-beloved gimmick that has become synonymous with a visit to the city. On any given weekend, a line of selfie-takers stretches around the block. It’s a mandatory visit for bachelorette groups and mural tours that promise unlimited selfie opportunities.
Like the metaphor, selfie murals bypass the opportunity for self-reflection and originality. Beyond the popular wings genre, selfie murals often feature bright colors and strongly lineated patterns that display well on mobile phone screens. A repeated pattern, like hearts scrawled in technicolored spray paint, or a word written over and over again, create a wallpaper-esque backdrop tinged with counterculture cool. As with the disembodied wings, they favor a straight-on, mug-shot perspective. If you’ve seen a foot of the mural, you’ve seen it all: there is little narrative or visual detail to encourage audiences to explore different vantage points. The murals emphasize aesthetics over subject matter and patterns over figurative content, with very little to anchor the mural to the surrounding community. Vivid and vapid, most selfie murals place few emotional or intellectual demands on the viewer.
Today’s selfie murals are as aggressively self-promotional as they are milquetoast. At the Nashville Wings mural, an inch or two from the wings themselves, the artist has spelled out her Instagram handle and the real estate development’s identifying hashtag in massive block lettering. The inclusion of these tags belies the mural’s ultimate purpose as a marketing tool, guaranteeing the viral replication of identifying details.
While street artists of old skirted the line of anonymity and identifiable characteristics within their work, these new artists seek maximum commercial exposure for themselves and their patrons. They place their Instagram handles—a modern day calling card—within inches of their artwork, along with hashtags that identify the artwork and the urban development. Conspicuously close to the artwork, the selfie-taker can’t take a photo without the inclusion of the handle and hashtags. And so you have the #RotundaWings of the Rotunda shopping mall in Baltimore, the #71jeanscentre at a denim shop in Italy, or the #htxwings in Houston. These marketing details reveal the transactional relationship expected by the artist and commercial sponsors: a cute selfie backdrop in exchange for exposing your followers to our advertising.
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When the world around us is re-tasked in pursuit of our hashtagged selfies, new expectations are foisted on our surroundings. We interact with our surroundings opportunistically, expecting these public places to fulfill our personal desires and expectations. A binary bit of code is running in the background of our minds, constantly asking the question, “can this situation be used to make me look good?” The need for the perfectly-framed and posed photo becomes the priority.
Beyond the personal cost, selfie murals are part of a larger trend separating us from life’s serendipity. In The Playful Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture, new media scholar Michiel de Lange notes that tech-integrated spaces often encourage behavior that is “contractual and rule-governed, goal-oriented, and favors rationalized efficiency.” We move about our environments with an economized awareness, relying on ever-available lists and maps to provide us with the best mural, the best café, the best sites in our surroundings.
In a momentous essay on serendipity, Sven Birkerts describes the creative exchange that occurs between person and circumstance: “value is not always found by concerted effort or through rational process, but might be discovered accidentally.” While exploring a new city, it’s easy enough to pull up Instagram and quickly figure out the most “Instagram-worthy” hot spots (if the Internet hasn’t supplied them already). But in the search for aesthetically primed environments like selfie murals, we’re muting the joys of discovery and surprise routed in our environments. We’ve become too efficient.
A quick Instagram search of the #NashvilleWings reveals the same photo ad nauseum—the same pose, the same front-facing composition, over and over again. The prefabricated glamour of the Nashville wings can belong to any average-height human capable of standing. If the act of selfie-taking is rooted in the impulse to establish identity, then it is ironic that the pre-made selfie mural hastens conformity. This is what Birkerts calls the “shifting from initiative to obedience” of digital living. When we have the opportunity to flit between ready-made photo opportunity, we have fewer motivations to engage deeply with the world around us.
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Public spaces have been tasked with different purposes through history. In ancient Athens, the agora was a space where democratic ideals might be upheld and achieved. George-Eugene Haussmann widened Paris’s medieval streets in an effort to eradicate civil unrest and cholera. In the aftermath of World War II, Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck emphasized outdoor play spaces in his city plans, believing the sight of children playing would aid in the recovery of traumatized citizens.
The shared spaces of a community—its parks, sidewalks, libraries, houses of worship, and businesses—shore up our social infrastructure and build interpersonal trust within communities. In his new book Palaces for the People, sociologist Eric Klinenberg notes that local, person-to-person interactions are the “building blocks of all public life. People forge bonds…not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interactions, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow.”
Recently, a co-worker of mine scrolled through his phone, showing me photo after photo of a nicely-dressed woman standing before rainbow-hued murals in the Gulch. “The worst fight I ever had with my girlfriend was because of those murals,” he said. My friend had incurred the wrath of his sweetheart when, after an hour of playing portrait photographer, he suggested they explore Nashville’s more mutually-rewarding sites. He was clearly unaware of the shifting expectations driven by uninterrupted social connectivity.
Public spaces designed for selfie-taking support social atomization. Rather than promoting face-to-face interaction, they encourage the individualization of the selfie-taker. The physical space of the painted wall is secondary to its function online, where it is only as valuable as its ability to enhance a manufactured identity. In the process of objectifying the public space, selfie-takers become alienated from the very setting they are trying to capture. Social media is both the inspiration and the end result, with the mural as the physical midway point.
A cheesy wall mural may not doom Western civilization, but it does reveal how today’s always- on social connectivity is quietly reshaping the real world around us. As more businesses, marketers, and artists discover the promotional potential of vanity-flattering murals, the public arena will be increasingly exploited in the service of our online identities. Imprecise words give way to imprecise thoughts, Orwell noted. With such ready-made substitutions for self-expression always at hand, we will come to know ourselves less and less.
It’s never too late to become reacquainted with our real-world identities. After the Nashville meltdown, my coworker’s girlfriend recalibrated how she was relating to social media. She took a break from Instagram and in the absence of its self-focused pressure, began reconnecting to the vividness of her surroundings and her place within them.
Published in The Technoskeptic, Issue #4, Fall 2019