Shared Meals: Instagram as a space for virtual feasting and rites of incorporation
While we eat to satisfy hunger and nourish our bodies, some of the most radical effects occur precisely when food is dissociated from eating and eating from nourishment.
Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium’ in Richard Gough, Performance Research: On Cooking. London: Routledge, 1999, pp.1-30 (p.3)
Instagram is full of food. At the time of writing there are 242,386,633 posts on Instagram using the hashtag #food; not to mention countless variations of food associated hashtags (#foodporn, #yum #foodie, etc.). A scroll through Instagram’s ‘Search & Explore’ feed soon evidences our love of sharing what we are about to eat. However, this food cannot be consumed by the vast majority of its audience in any immediate or literal sense. Although many food outlets use Instagram as a free marketing tool - showing us appealing food that we could eat if we visited – food shared in Instagram posts by individual users is generally reserved for only the closest family and friends of those individuals. The rest of us are left dissatisfied only able to gaze at the feasts glowing behind the glass of our smartphones. With this peculiar, dissatisfactory, virtual commensality in mind, this text explores how Instagram serves as a space for food. Contextualising my recently completed work, A drawing made by cutting up my body weight in celery1 amongst the fields of performance and new media, and in relation to cultural and art theory; paying particular attention to the “clean-eating” community indigenous to the platform.2
Clean-eating is one of Instagram’s most successful and pervasive exports. The clean-eating community is typical of the platform’s food trends, possessing a clear aesthetic: vibrant generally green images of often raw but immaculately prepped and presented fruits and vegetables. Instagram posts under the clean-eating banner are generally accompanied by the maximum number of hashtags (30, invariably including #eatclean), and captions dictating anonymous and uncertified statements on the panacea qualities of the depicted foods. Significantly, clean-eating has graduated from URL to IRL.3 The increasingly permeable divide between URL and IRL has been breached by the likes of Joe Wicks (@thebodycoach) and the Hemsley Sisters (hemsleyhemsley), whose astronomical rise to Instagram fame has transitioned them from Instagram food bloggers to celebrity chefs. Such jettisoning from amateur to celebrity is a distinctly neoliberal phenomenon. Coined by Alexander Rüstow in 1938, the term Neoliberalism has been used to varying effect. It was adopted by scholars in the 1980’s when Western politicians and economists sought a resurgence of 19th century laissez-faire economic liberalism to stabilise society. Embracing neoliberal economic policies involved privatisation, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending. David Harvey explained neoliberalism as, ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free trades.'4 However, the term has now loosened in its meaning, coming to encompass any practices associated with free markets. The belief was that a different type of person would emerge through the adoption of these policies, this would be an individual capable of self-regulation and self-governing: an entrepreneur. In his lectures on the Neoliberal Condition, philosopher and cultural theorist Michel Feher uses the evolution of the career path to celebrity chef to explain the shifting cultural economies in the age of social media which encapsulate neoliberalism in the age of Web2.0.5 Simply put, in the recent past the established route to celebrity chef was to gain cooking qualifications, train at particular cookery schools, work your way up the restaurant hierarchy, gradually gain recognition from experts and restaurant critics having sampled your food, and maybe all this work may eventually lead to a book deal. In contrast, todays’ route via the social-media-entrepreneurial-bypass is a gift to the amateur, favouring style over substance and a strong internet fan-base accumulated by going viral. By amassing significant numbers of followers through sharing images of attractive food, an Instagram based food blogger could find themselves with a book deal, TV appearances, product lines; having already demonstrated to an investor that there is an engaged audience interested in what they are doing without ever leaving their kitchen. As quixotic as it sounds, this second pathway, described by Feher, has been the route of Instagram originating sensations like Wicks, and the Hemsley Sisters, as well as the likes of Ella Mills (@deliciouslyella) and Anthony William (@medicalmedium).6 It should also be noted that these Instagrammer’s self-styled self-branding is embedded in the advocacy of clean-eating practices. It is evident from the careers of the afore-mentioned Insta-famous celebrity clean-eaters that the clean-eating subculture represents a cultural acuity which might be used as a lens through which Instagram’s relationship to food might be examined.
Soft power
In his introduction to You Are Here: Art After the Internet, (2014) curator and writer Omar Kholief observes how dystopian visions of the future often tend to focus on our relationship to the hardware of technology, as opposed to its software.7 Overemphasis on the physicality of technology detracts from its increasing entanglement in our social lives, which are increasingly mediated by software and applications such as Instagram. Writing on the mythic and cultural practices inherent to computer enabled communication, Vincent Mosco comments on the duality of technology and its virtual and physical implications, choosing to focus primarily on its software, since,8
…cyberspace is mutually constituted out of culture and political economy, out of the interconnected realities of myth and social institution.
What Kholief and Mosco point to is emblematic of the second stage of the internet, often referred to as Web2.0: a period in which the internet is primarily used for human socialising, its software part of the invisible fabric of our everyday lives.9 Instagram provides a table for us to lay our lives out on, unlike other platforms it functions primarily as a mode of self-broadcast. As for the hardware which once occupied so much physical space, it is continually miniaturising; compacting to fit innocuously in the palm of the hand, or even wearable; combined into accessories such as watches, seeping further into the make-up our lives. The miniaturisation of the hardware (which supports software and applications like Instagram), makes the virtual feel more real than ever before, and the hardware feel more part of us than ever before; at times like a prosthetic limb, at times like a familiar.
As indicated previously regarding the journey of food bloggers to celebrity chefs via social media, virtual spaces such as Instagram have affect in real terms. Whilst Net artists of the 1990’s explored the possibilities of constructing new identities online - exaggerating the divide between URL and IRL - today for many the internet is reality: an inhabitable and cultivatable environment of increasing potency.10 This is especially true for generations who have grown up with the internet as an, ‘invisible given’,11 and are the most social media savvy: the millennials and generation iGen, groups Gene McHugh describes as ‘digital natives’.12 For this group of people in particular,13
Instead of thinking of their digital identity and their real-space identity as separate things, they just have an identity (with representations in two, three, or more different spaces.)
The conflation of virtual/reality/public/personal/work/private identities is at the foreground of new media artist Jeremy Bailey’s work. Combining performance and new media, any demarcation between identities appropriate to specific cultural contexts is eroded in Bailey’s performance-to video-to YouTube artworks. The disorienting convergence of personas has a de-familiarising effect; a device which Bertolt Brecht described as the ‘distancing effect’ or the ‘alienation effect’ whereby the familiar becomes strange.14 Reframed within a contemporary performance art practice, Bailey’s upbeat vlogger style persona, cheerful greetings and informal conversation is made strange through the forcing together of usually disparate contexts. Bailey’s performances capture the collapsing of the barriers between the traditional spheres of our lives, using YouTube as a stage and gallery space.
Dinner is served
Professor of Performance Studies, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett characterises three key junctures between performance and food practices, stating that: to perform is to ‘do’; to perform is to ‘behave’; and to perform is to ‘show’.15 Citing Erving Goffman’s observation of, ‘the performance in everyday life’, Kirschenblatt-Gimblett expands; explaining that as to perform is to do - meaning getting something done - it is based in materials, processes, actions, tools and techniques; as is the preparation and serving of food. Secondly, food practices are inherently habitual through both necessity and culture; and therefore are forms of ‘behaving’: as necessity demands the repeated behaviour of eating or else one would starve; and as food practices in relation to culture are enacted appropriate behaviours in connection with any stage within the food cycle.16 Thirdly, when ‘doing’ and ‘behaving’ are displayed, or ‘shown’, they invite observation and critique: the point at which Kirschenblatt-Gimblett observes that, ‘…taste as a sensory experience and taste as an aesthetic faculty converge.'17 Of these three operations linking performance and food Kirschenblatt-Gimblett concludes;18
All three senses of performance – to do, to behave, to show – operate all through the food system, but vary according to which sense of performance is focal, elaborated, or suppressed.
With these operations of performance in mind, I would argue that the juncture between performance and food might be extended to include (and therefore understand), Instagram practices. Firstly, since the platform is composed of both hardware and software it could be considered as a tool used for the act of serving food onto the platform (to the platform’s users), and therefore as a tool implicit in the ‘doing’ of that serving. Secondly, Instagram culture dictates behaviours, as is evident from the recognisability of its subcultures, such as clean-eating, which circulate the platform and adhere to certain accepted aesthetic principles of that subculture. Instagram captures diets influenced by social expectations, religions, health problems, and customs: all forms of ‘behaving’. Clean-eating is an archetypal Instagram subculture, as previously described its posts are easily identifiable by their fresh green aesthetic and predictable hashtags.19 Finally, and perhaps most overtly, Instagram is ‘showing’: sharing the results of the ‘doing’ and the ‘behaving’; engaging observation and critique through the platform’s cultural expectation of other users to react and comment. Whilst working through these operations of ‘doing’, ‘behaving’ and ‘showing’, Instagram disconnects food from gustatory and olfactory senses, literally bypassing the nose and mouth. Such a divorce of food from eating is termed, ‘sensory dissociation’ by Kirschenblatt-Gimblett,20 inferring alternate purposes for food in its presence on the platform.
Bake-Off runner-up and food writer, Ruby Tandoh observes how food’s appearance on Instagram is of superior significance to its taste, confessing that despite her profession as a food writer, that when it comes to food and Instagram,21
It’s aesthetic first, taste later and, quite often, no taste at all.
Tandoh’s admission confirms Instagram’s production of sensory dissociation which opens up the question of what effects fill the void that this gap creates? By way of comparison, it should be noted that restaurants, shops, supermarkets and cookbooks all used photos of food long before social media. These images aim to lure in customers and illustrate recipes in order to make them more attractive; they are intended to appeal to our olfactory and gustatory senses despite only the visual being available to us. It is therefore the work of the food stylist to use visual cues to recall particular tastes and smells in the absence of gustatory and olfactory stimuli. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett notes that this ‘studio food’ is therefore both mimetic and indexical: it is made to appear convincing enough to hypothetically grace your dining room table, and it visually indexes qualities we know from other sensory modalities in order to prompt our digestive desires. These responses (a rumbling tummy, a watering mouth), which might be involuntary and spontaneous upon seeing an image of appealing food, are triggered by visual cues which we have learnt over time.
Food as a cultural index
Just as styled food registers sensory indexes, food also serves as a cultural index: demarcating social, political and economic identity. Unsurprisingly, food as a cultural index has been used historically in art and architecture as a signifier and narrative device. From The Dunmore Pineapple Folly at Dunmore Park in Scotland,22 to Abraham van Beyeren – a 17th Century Dutch still-life painter specialising in paintings of the most luxurious of foods, the foods depicted in both the Dunmore Folly’s architecture and spilling out of van Beyeren’s paintings such as Still Life with Lobster and Fruit,23 are used as a cultural index to communicate wealth, social status and cultural sophistication. Sam Mercer and Anna Dannemann, curators of Food for Being Looked At, (2017) at the Photographers Gallery,24 believe that although Instagram users are not intentionally referencing or engaging with art history or the history of the still life, that the aesthetic principles of the still life are absorbed into Instagram food photos on a subconscious level, and therefore food photos on Instagram have a place in an art historical context.25 Food’s symbolic significance, which Roland Barthes would identify as the use of food as a signifier to sustain a myth, is evidently of primary importance in the context of Instagram, since although its sensory indexes make the images of food more appealing, our experience of the food itself remains purely visual.26
As a cultural index food shows us an immediately discernible visual lexicon which (like its sensory counterpart), prompts a spontaneous response - albeit not digestive. The reading and recognition of the latent cultural index attached to food in Instagram posts is conveyed through external acknowledgement; communicated through likes, comments and follows from other users responding to a post. This desired positive interaction on social media is summed up by Michel Feher’s theories on neoliberal economies of ‘appreciation’, in which consistent accumulation of likes, followers and praise on Instagram improves your cultural and social capital, and makes “brand-you” a viable investment; à la the career paths of Wicks, Williams, Mills, et al.27
#likeforlikebackalways
This exchange-based interaction between users is an essential aspect of Instagram behaviour; and key to understanding Instagram in relation to food practices. Professor and Curator of New Media Art, Beryl Graham observes shared concerns between new media and performance art, such as issues of process, document, interaction and materiality vs. the conceptual or virtual.28 Considering these overlapping issues Graham states that, ‘The question of how the performance or artwork is relating to the audience … is therefore of enduring importance to the whole field’; situating interactivity and exchange in the foreground of new media practices.29 Additionally, what Graham is describing also implicates the audience as key players in relation to the ‘doing’, ‘behaving’ and ‘showing’ that Kirschenblatt-Gimblett outlined as the junctures between performance and food; which as I laid out earlier can be extended to include Instagram practices. Accordingly, the ‘showing’ of the ‘doing’ and the ‘behaving’ on/via Instagram prompts other users to take action; to ‘do’ and ‘behave’ appropriately, ‘showing’ their approval, and participating in the exchanges of appreciation which Feher describes.
In an early minimalist new media work by Alexei Shulgin, titled appropriately prosaically, Form Art, the audience interacts with the work by mindlessly clicking through endless pages of meaningless forms.30 The expected behaviour is immediately obvious to anyone with even the most basic computing literacy; the interface prompts us to ‘behave’, enacting the expected repetitious and mundane act of clicking through webpages, abstracted to absurdity through the exaggeration of a simple behaviour from the everyday. Shulgin uses the computer interface as a medium through which to prompt certain performed repetitive behaviours appropriated from the performance of everyday life of the viewer. The software which is the framework for Form Art operates in a manner reminiscent of Allan Kapprow’s performance scores for Happenings – providing a set of instructions for ‘doing’, ‘behaving’ and ‘showing’ which can be enacted without the presence of the artist. In comparison, Instagram provides a framework which facilitates human to human interaction, and has established a neoliberal culture of appreciation based exchanges between self-broadcasting individuals as expected behaviour. Within this culture are thriving sub-cultures, like the clean-eating trend, which are dependent on and enforce these expected exchanges which are tailored to match their aesthetic and apparent raison d'être.
Lively
In practical terms the interactivity that the new phase of the internet (known as Web 2.0), is founded on is only possible due to the significant improvement of broadband coverage. Faster broadband speeds mean close to real-time connectivity, transcending geography, and making online exchanges feel more real.31 Social media depends on the ersatz “live-ness” promised by good network coverage and connectivity, facilitating computer mediated “live” communication and human interaction. The potential for technology to aid human interaction has been playfully explored in pieces such as Toshio Iwai’s Resonance of 4, in which four computer mice control a grid projected onto the floor which can be ‘played’ via the mice like a musical instrument: a work which is best animated through live collaborative play between visitors, facilitated by technology.32 Regarding Iwai’s work, Graham describes the technology involved performing as,33
…a kind of subtle party host…
Common referral to Instagram as a ‘platform’ hints at its role as an agent of human interaction: a virtual meeting place human socialising and ideas sharing when people have time to kill. Instagram s an invisible framework immediately accessible through convenient and unobtrusive technology which processes, retrieves and delivers human communication in the blink of an eye, its speed and inconspicuousness disguising its presence as an intermediary.
Call and Response
As Professor Michael Norton, of the Harvard Business School has observed, despite the youth of social media there are clear expected patterns of behaviour already embedded in its use:34
‘…we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that something that we do online is behaviour X and then the rest of us are supposed to do behaviour Y, and if people don’t do behaviour Y then people are upset. There is in a way a sense that behaviour online is kind of patterned by these rigid sequences where everyone should do ‘this’ and then everyone should do ‘that’. It’s very different to a religious service but the underlying psychology can be quite similar.
The implications of the expected exchanges of behaviour which Professor Norton describes are elaborated by professional celebrant Tiu De Haan;35
The difference between a habit and a ritual is that habit is just repeated behaviour, and a ritual is a set of actions and usually words that you imbue with meaning’.
As previously discussed, the ‘live’ interactions between users are certainly not meaningless - they are charged with significance; the accompanying captions and hashtags both descriptive and emotive; and the desired appreciative reactions from other users suffused with cultural and social capital. With this in mind, clean-eating food practices on Instagram might be understood accordingly: the preparation, presentation, capturing on camera and sharing of images of food adhering to the aesthetic conventions of clean-eating and subsequent interaction from other users, echo Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s outline of three junctures of ‘doing’, ‘behaving’ and ‘showing’ between food and performance, to which I have been arguing that Instagram should be integrated. The sum of this ‘doing’, ‘behaving’ and ‘showing’ considered as a set of expected and meaningful actions epitomise what Professor Norton called behaviour X; and the platform’s social framework whereby an affirmative response is hoped for (Michel Feher’s ‘appreciation’), is representative of Professor Norton’s description of behaviour Y. The totality of these actions is as full of meaning as a call and response in a religious ritual, as is hinted at by Norton. This is not to say that every interaction on Instagram should be understood as ritualistic, rather, that for certain sub-cultures such as clean-eating which attract particular fervour, dedication and present an acuity on Instagram, ritual is key to understanding the implication of these interactions and how they reflect Instagram as a space for food.
Many of these interactions enact a call and response in a literal sense. Written words accompanying images of food play a vital role in affirming the intended meaning of the image they accompany. My recent contribution to Dr Alan Dunn’s latest iteration of Four Words, explores the significance of the language attached to images shared on Instagram; the four words I contributed being: #likeforlikealways.36 The phrase #likeforlikealways is appropriated from social media and is a typical example of a popular Instagram hashtagged phrase. Its use as a hashtag to accompany an image or video shared on the platform encapsulates the neoliberal system of exchanges of appreciation Feher has noted. The hashtagged phrase explicitly spells out the pattern of expected behaviour of the platform’s users.
#likeforlikealways is not a phrase that you would use out loud or in conversation; the pulling together of the words, bound by their hashtag, gives the phrase the quality of an incantation. Thereby, #likeforlikealways might be considered as a movement within a ritual as well as evidence of a ritual occurring; as it indicates and dictates a set of expected actions, specific to the virtual space in which it is used, which have meaning beyond their literal enactment. The repeated use of the phrase (at the time of writing there are 6,797,008 Instagram posts using the hashtagged phrase), further implicates the hashtag into a system where selfies, photos of shoes and food are more than just repeated behaviours. As I have discussed, such posts and their accompanying phrases are part of new social rituals of which #likeforlikealways is one of many unuttered incantations. These rituals serve to on one hand perpetuate the cycles of appreciation bent on gaining social and cultural capital, but more importantly, they are rituals of incorporation: whereby individuals can align themselves and hope to be accepted into Instagram’s many subcultural, virtual communities.
The clean-eating trend on Instagram is rooted in these rituals and sequences of behaviour, for which Instagram provides a virtual platform to host these communions. Through this virtual commensality, and through consistent sharing and engagement users constantly kindle connections and reaffirm their allegiance with a community, such as that of the clean-eaters, whose posting and interactions creates a shared narrative based around their shared eating practices. This shared narrative legible from the cultural indexes discerned from food photos and their attached captions and hashtags binds together virtual communities through virtual commensality, despite geographical distance and the absence of actual shared meals. Vincent Mosco describes these shared myths as a daily, ‘consensual hallucination’; through which a virtual community might be imagined and incorporated into one’s identity.37 Speaking more generally of the allure of the virtual realm, Mosco also argues that central to the mythology of cyberspace is the idea of limitlessness; a seductive idea, through which communities might be founded outside of the restrictions of time and geography.38
Despite the virtual vastness of the internet and its social media networks, platforms such as Instagram afford individuals the possibility of creating the illusion of proximity through the formation of virtual communities of shared identity. In the case of clean-eating, this illusion of proximity affords users a sense of commensality which sustains the clean-eating community through rituals founded in the virtual sharing of meals. Instagram facilitated interaction between users affirms their incorporation into these communities; ‘Feasts are prominent in rites of incorporation, where commensality, the act of eating together, is an archetype of union.’39 Virtual communities like the clean-eaters exist through rituals of mutual affirmation and incorporation, using Instagram as a virtual banqueting hall to facilitate commensal user-generated feasting upon images allegorising the origin stories of their post-geographic communities.
A drawing made by cutting up my body weight in celery 2016-17
..the preparation of food is a language in which the intrinsic structure of a society is unconsciously manifested.40
A drawing made by cutting up my body weight in celery is a year-long performance project which, like the majority of people in the West, has on- and off- line lives. Performed privately to smartphone, the videos are then filtered and trimmed, using the Instagram app, before being collaged together with appropriated #words (hashtags). Borrowing the language of the rituals of incorporation I have described, the words are taken from existing posts which use either #celery, #drawing or #likes; indicative of Instagram’s neoliberal economy of appreciation. At times absurd (#poweredbyplants), at times borderline aggressive (#eatlikeyougiveafuck), the hashtags make interlopers of the videos; decoys inserting them into unexpected discourses where they may not necessarily be welcome. Taking the position of a digital native I worked through the platform, using it as a site for performance art – an approach described by Tyler Robarge as ‘swipe-specific’ – working with and on the platform which facilitates the clean-eating communities and associated rituals which the work responds to.41 The performed act of cutting up my body weight in celery on paper produced a drawing in its most literal sense as a process of mark making captured in the multitudinous short performances on smartphone camera.
Celery itself is a totem of clean-eating, a regular feature of clean-eating Instagram posts, with its own history of inaccurate and near-mythical health associations; namely for being a minus calorie - a vegetable made of 95% water and supposedly burning rather than providing since it requires so much energy to digest. Celery is an icon of a community whose shared myths promote acerbic eating habits and refute medical advice. Subverting the expected aesthetic of clean-eating posts, A drawing made by cutting up my body weight in celery foregrounds the usually unseen aspects of the ‘doing’ in preparation for the ritual of posting food on Instagram, by ‘showing’ only endless videos of food preparation for its own sake, rather than the typical perfected, immaculate end product.
Instagrammed, filtered disordered eating hides the labour of its uneaten fruits, yet here, all that is visible is labour: over 900 short performance to video clips of labour. The appropriated hashtags reinsert the project into the circulating discourse it is engaged with, producing unexpected interactions and a defamiliarising effect, interrupting Instagram’s expected call and response.
End Notes
Go to footnote reference 1.Zara Worth A drawing made by cutting up my body weight in celery 2016-17 Celery and kitchen knife on paper, Instagram 57x76.4cm All images courtesy of the artist
Go to footnote reference 2.An exact definition of clean-eating is hard to identify as it seems to mean so much to so many individuals. In ‘Why We Fell for Clean Eating’ Bee Wilson lays out a rough interpretation of clean-eating; At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods (whatever is meant by these deeply ambiguous terms). Some versions of clean eating have been vegan, while others espouse various meats (preferably wild) and something mysteriously called “bone broth” (stock, to you and me)… But it quickly became clear that “clean eating” was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure. Seemingly out of nowhere, a whole universe of coconut oil, dubious promises and spiralised courgettes has emerged.’ The Guardian, Friday 11 August 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/11/why-we-fell-for-clean-eating
Go to footnote reference 3.A URL is the address of a page on the World Wide Web and has come to refer to anything in the online realm. Correspondingly, IRL – an abbreviation of ‘in real life’ – is used in online contexts such as social media, gaming, etc, to refer to social interaction in the physical world.
Go to footnote reference 4.Alice E. Marwick, ‘Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Self-Banding in Web 2.0’, PhD Thesis. 2010 New York University, http://www.tiara.org/blog/wp-c... marwick_dissertation_statusupdate.pdf (p.301)
Go to footnote reference 5.Michel Feher ‘The Age of Appreciation: Lectures on the Neoliberal Condition 2013-2015’, Operative Thought Lecture Series Hosted by the Department of Visual Cultures, Centre for Research Architecture and Forensic Architecture, 2013-2015 http://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/life/guest-lectures/
Go to footnote reference 6.For context, the aforementioned Instagram personalities have attracted Instagram followers as follows: @thebodycoach (Joe Wicks) – 1.9m followers; @hemsleyhemsley (The Hemsley Sisters) – 305,000 followers; @deliciouslyella (Ella Mills) – 1.1m followers; @medicalmedium (Anthony William) 571,000 followers: demonstrating their power as influencers and their substantial fan base which has translated into a profitable audience.
Go to footnote reference 7.Omar Kholeif edited, You Are Here: Art After the Internet, London: SPACE, Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2014.
Go to footnote reference 8.Vincent Mosco The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press 2004, 10.
Go to footnote reference 9.Kholief describes these circumstances as, ‘…the intangible sphere where so much of our lives have become increasingly mediated. Kholeif ed. You Are Here: Art After the Internet.
Go to footnote reference 10.Gene McHugh argues that for younger generations the divide between online and offline selves is almost non-existent, as they have never known life without digital technology. ‘The Context of the Digital: A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’ in Kholeif ed. 31.
Go to footnote reference 11.Jennifer Chan, ‘Notes on Post-Internet’ in Kholeif ed. 110
Go to footnote reference 12.Gene McHugh, ‘The Context of the Digital: A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’ in Kholeif ed. 28-35.
Go to footnote reference 13.Gene McHugh citing John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, ‘The Context of the Digital: A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’ in Kholeif ed. 31
Go to footnote reference 14.Anthony Squiers, An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2014.
Go to footnote reference 15.Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium’ in Richard Gough, Performance Research: On Cooking. London: Routledge 1999, 1-30 (1-2)
Go to footnote reference 16.The food cycle itself being described by Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett as consisting of five stages: procuring and producing; storage, distribution and exchange; processing and preparation; consumption; and disposal. ibid, 12.
ibid, 2
Go to footnote reference 18.ibid, 12
See previous description of typical clean-eating Instagram posts.
ibid, 3.
Go to footnote reference 21.Ruby Tandoh, ‘Made to Share’, The Guardian G2, November 2016, 6-9 (9).
Go to footnote reference 22.William Chambers The Dunmore Pineapple, 1761, Building: Folly at Dunmore Park, Scotland.
Go to footnote reference 23.Abraham van Beyeren Still Life with Lobster and Fruit early 1650s, Oil on wood, 96.5 x 78.7 cm
Go to footnote reference 24.Food for Being Looked At, curated by Anna Dannemann and Sam Mercer at The Photographer’s Gallery, London 2017.
Go to footnote reference 25.Anna Dannemann and Sam Mercer interviewed by Zara Worth, at The Photographer’s Gallery, London. 31 August 2017.
Go to footnote reference 26.Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. London: Vintage Classics 2009.
Go to footnote reference 27.Michel Feher ‘The Age of Appreciation: Lectures on the Neoliberal Condition 2013-2015’, Operative Thought Lecture series Hosted by the Department of Visual Cultures, Centre for Research Architecture and Forensic Architecture (2013-2015) http://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/life/guest-lectures/
Go to footnote reference 28.Beryl Graham, ‘Interaction/Participation: Disembodied Performance in New Media Art’, in Dead History, Live Art?: Spectacle, Subjectivity and Subversion in Visual Culture since the 1960s, edited by Jonathan Harris, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2007, 241-260 (259).
Go to footnote reference 29.ibid, 258.
Go to footnote reference 30.Alexei Shulgin Form Art, 1997, New media.
Go to footnote reference 31.Vincent Mosco The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press 2004, 92.
Go to footnote reference 32.Toshio Iwai’s Resonance of 4, 1994, New media
Go to footnote reference 33.Beryl Graham, ‘Interaction/Participation: Disembodied Performance in New Media Art’, 254.
‘Ritual’ The Digital Human, Series 12, Episode 3. BBC Radio 4, 9 October. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme... [Accessed online: 16 October 2017]
Go to footnote reference 35.ibid
Go to footnote reference 36.The latest iteration of Alan Dunn’s Four Words project brings together contributions from artists for an installation for the Media Wall at the Leeds Tech Hub. You can find out more about Alan Dunn’s on-going project here: http://alandunn67.co.uk/fourwords.html
Go to footnote reference 37.Mosco, 12.
Go to footnote reference 38.ibid.
Go to footnote reference 39.Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett,'Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium’, 23.
Go to footnote reference 40.Adelina von Fürstenberg, ‘Reflections on the Nourishing Earth, Agriculture and Food’, in Food edited by Clémence Dardel, Laure Lane & Juliette Sanson, Italy: Skira 2014, 10.
Go to footnote reference 41.Tyler Robarge, ‘Zara Worth & Swipe-Specific Art’, Omni-Modern, Available at: http://www.omni-modern.com/zara-worth---swipe-specific.html
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‘Ritual’ The Digital Human, Series 12, Episode 3. BBC Radio 4, 9 October, accessed online 16 October 2017 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...
Tyler Robarge, ‘Zara Worth & Swipe-Specific Art’, Omni-Modern, accessed online http://www.omni-modern.com/zar...
Anthony Squiers, An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2014.
Ruby Tandoh, ‘Made to Share’, The Guardian G2, November 2016, 6-9.
Adelina von Fürstenberg, ‘Reflections on the Nourishing Earth, Agriculture and Food’, in Food edited by Clémence Dardel, Laure Lane & Juliette Sanson, Italy: Skira 2014.
Zara Worth uses current food and lifestyle trends as inroads for investigating the cultures, economies and neoliberalism of Web2.0. Since receiving a Studentship from Leeds Beckett University in 2016, her practice-led doctoral research has focused on exploring how Instagram might be used as a site, strategy and subject for post-internet art practice. She studied Fine Art at Northumbria University, before receiving a scholarship to study MA Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths. Her recent work Wellness (2017) will be published in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice later this year. More information about her practice and activities can be found on her website www.zaraworth.com