Internet on My Skin

SELF OBSERVATIONS by Franziska Ostermann is a series of photographic self-portraits about claiming space on the internet as a woman and making it your own. With SELF OBSERVATIONS, the German artist explores performance and self-portraiture, and rethinks the role of the selfie and the female image and gaze in photography. Photographs represent fragments of our identities on the internet, a virtual space we cannot physically enter.

"In 2018, a new world unfolded before my eyes when I read an interview with media artist Signe Pierce. This led me to Anika Meier's column on internet culture for Monopol Magazine. I saw women not just claiming space on Instagram and the internet, but actively reshaping it with new visual habits.

They used smartphones as tools of empowerment, presenting them as legitimate cameras. These women showed themselves as they chose, capturing and sharing images on their own terms and with their own aesthetics, not as men with cameras have traditionally depicted them. By rejecting the male gaze, the selfie becomes a feminist act.

The distinctive aesthetics of the internet, dominated by deep blues, powerful pinks, and iridescent reflections, drew me in completely. The colors were loud and unfamiliar, yet there was an energy conveyed through them, a space marked that immediately drew me in. I've been wearing nothing but white for ten years, a choice that has long echoed in my work. I wanted to inhabit the space these artists were building. I aimed to claim my own room within and shape it with my own gentle, luminous aesthetic.

I brought smartphones into this space and saw it amplified through them. Each display became an open visual space, like another dimension. I arranged the smartphones as if their cameras were referencing other elements within the image, playing with expectations of what you think you're seeing. One smartphone, for instance, extends beyond the edge of the image, suggesting that the picture doesn't end where it appears to.

I wanted to enter this space myself, but could only do so through a photograph. The image could only hold so little of me, perhaps a fragment. The smartphones display multiple views of the same scene of me, a collection of such fragments. Maybe, together, they form an entirely new whole. The screens are portals, allowing her to visit this digital realm from the physical world. They create links, much like crystals, connecting the tangible and the virtual. My wisdom teeth, the ultimate marker of identification, disrupt the otherwise calm visual atmosphere. They still have a bit of blood on them, but they’re also still white."

– Franziska Ostermann