The selfiecity project has launched earlier this week, and boy, it has hit a nerve. We had 10’000s of visitors in the first few days, and hundreds of articles and posts linking to the project.
It has been a great pleasure and stimulation to work with an exceptionally interesting team on this: from Lev Manovich (a legend in the media theory and digital humanities scene) over my brilliant — and, luckily, by now, frequent — collaborator Dominikus Baur to Daniel Goddemeyer, Mehrdad Yazdani and many other talented folks.
The project investigates a seemingly mundane topic — selfies (#omg #wtf). Of course, the topic has been a big hype for the last few months, and was even Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. If you search for selfie on Google Images, your worst expectations are confirmed — bikini blondes, duckfaces — all the clichés you would expect.
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