SELFIE
GYM

A selfie is a picture of oneself usually taken from one’s mobile phone. It’s an image taken as a self-portrait or self- photo, often to be shared on social networks. By sharing it, you allow others to construct an opinion about you, you allow them to make value judgments towards you or your image.

Do you think that the selfie empowers you?

Or is it a trend whose hidden motor is really a cry for help, a way to draw attention to the others?

Then, do you think that a selfie is a complete and reliable representation of yourself?

In this space you will be able to experience and confront your relationship with this system of representation. It’s not about taking the following actions as mandatory tasks. Take the actions as you want and towards the meaning you want. The main thing is that the person that comes out in your selfies and you connect in the same place, in the same way.

This set of actions will help you to investigate in a playful way the notion of the selfie. Consider the actions in a specific time cycle (one day, one week, etc.). They are not arranged in a correlative way, you can start for the action you want and create your own set with all or some of the actions.

1. NO-WHERE
   Take a series of photographs of yourself in a “false” environment. Share the photos on social networks. Make everyone believe that you are in another place, with other people and doing something characteristic of that “imaginary place”.
2. MY OTHER BINARY ME
   Take a picture in a certain way in which the facial recognition software or similar techniques are not able to identify you. Try to make this image represent something characteristic about you.
   Biometrics is the automatic study for unique recognition of humans. It's based on one or more behavioural traits or physical intrinsic traits. In Information and Communication Technology (ICT) "biometric authentication" or "computer biometrics" is the application of mathematical and statistics techniques about physical or behavioural traits of an individual for its authentication. In other words, it is about "verifying" your identity. The categories of biometrci analysis are performed according to sex, age, weight, race, etc. You can make a small inquiry before performing the action: it will facilitate your performing.
3. SELFIE-FRANKESTEIN
   Select ten celebrities’ selfies uploaded on a social network. Print them and cut out from each of them the part of your face that you like most. Rebuild a new selfie with the extracted pieces of each image and scan them to create a new selfie. Upload the image to your social network under the name of “Selfie Frankenstein, What Beauty Hides”. To finish the action, ask others about who is it hiding behind that face.
   The selfie seems to show the happiness of being in a place, the security of looking good or the certainty that we are interesting to others. However, do we really see ourselves the way we self-portrait us in our selfies?
4. WHO AM I?
   Find three pictures of you in which you consider that you look good. Then, find three more in which you are not represented faithfully. Change your profile picture in the social network that you use more, alternating each of these two sets of photos. See which of them receives more “Likes”.
   This action aims to reflect on the type of images that you would use on a social networks’ profile. Or in the profile of your institute, college, or the enterprise where you would like to work in the future. Are we talking about the same person? Do we think about the same image?
5. MIRROR, LITTLE MIRROR
   Take a hand mirror and take a selfie without a phone. Invite whoever you want to take another similar selfie.
   This is an action that you can perform alone or in company, at home or on the street: it does not matter, look for a place where you feel comfortable. Suggest your teacher to enable a place in a common space of your educational centre to allow students and teachers to share the experience and be observed by others at the time they are performing this action.
6. MIMICAL
   Try a selfie pose without a phone, close your eyes and listen to what the body says in that position.
   To intensify this experience of the selfie’s dynamics body, stick your face to the floor or wall and feel every part of it as if you were photographing them: feel your nose, your forehead, your eyes, your mouth. Imagine your face photographed in that new position.
7. TAKE A SELFIE!
   Search Helene Meldahl’s Instagram account(@mirrorsme)and study her self-portraits. Create a replica or several of them using all your imagination and creativity.

The selfie not only represents the everyday image of a person, but it can also invent or broke its aesthetic code as well. Did you know that formerly photographs were retouched by hand using different types of paintings like watercolours? As an additional action of this block, you can try printing one of your selfies and transform it from manual manipulation with markers or other type of writing material.

The different actions displayed in this exercise aim to decentralize the issue of the device as a means and context of distribution of the aesthetics experience. Thus, we want to focus on the question of the relationship with the selfie’s codes of definition as a form of objectified “beauty” intended to our self-representation in the new spaces of social network.

In this sense, the use of tools outside the scope of ITC (such as collage, drawing or performing) has an essential role; the non-mediated procedures that have been presented in some of the exercises. All this can help the student to slow down his look before the action of self-representation, reinforcing their critical skills about the very fact of self-photography.

The main purpose of the selfie is to show our image before others, either in a realistic way or manipulated, so it’s important that these “actions” are shared not only with the student’s usual environment (friends, partner or close relatives), but with people that hardly know them. You could show part of this work in a physical space (corridors, gym, etc.) or in a virtual one (the school’s website or social networks) to see different opinions and reactions to the project.