The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

In the series Status Symbols, Lori Hepner creates twitter-portraits of people using text from social media sites that she translates into ASCII binary code, then into aesthetic information through digital and analogue processes. She creates virtual portraits that explore representations of personal identity within the public domain of social media.

Twitter has over 175 million registered users worldwide. The spread of social networking media on the Internet, especially over the last four years, has become a ubiquitous phenomenon. It has opened up a multiplicity of philosophical questions, many of which are yet to be properly examined, such as the notion of personal identity or identities. Websites such as Facebook and Twitter create powerful ways for people to construct a representation of themselves that may or may not relate to a conventional understanding of reality. The French Postmodernist theorist, Jean Baudrillard discusses these ideas in terms of the simulacrum; something that is not a copy of what we understand to be real, but is real enough in that it becomes a truth in its own right – the hyperreal.

Status Symbols consists of photographic self-portraits derived from multiple online feeds of 140 characters or less. These abstracted colour portraits, hand-printed and produced using a film camera, are created from photographing the 8 RGB rotating LEDs that use the written words as impulses to create an alternating sequence of lights. The open source hardware and software transform the text into binary code. Each portrait then represents a transient moment of identity in the digital world.

“…I can’t get the colours that I want using a digital camera; the build-up of light turns into white much faster while photographing digitally than it does use the colour negative film. The film allows all of the rotations of the LEDs to be captured and I can use the scanning process to pull out the colours that have built up on the negative like watercolour washes on paper.”

In many ways Hepner’s work is collaborative; previously she has openly invited people who tweet their messages as a part of the @1stfans Twitter Art feed at the Brooklyn Museum in December 2010. The electronics of the rotating lights was developed with the support of members from HackPittsburg who are a community based collective of inventors, scientists, artists and programmers. The conceptual focus for the work is mostly based on current events related to who we are and what we perceive ourselves to be online. The series also expands to integrate portraiture through online updates from high profile people such as @BarackObama and @Britneyspears, alongside the #status of everyday people. Hepner is keen to open out art to the public, to the extent that they are involved in the work and she may loose a degree of control. She is also interested in showing what people have to say about their identity and to visualise it in a way that we don’t usually see.

The work tests what photography can be. In some ways, it is one of the true representations of the origin of the form; the word photography derives from the Greek for ‘drawing with light’. Here the artist literally draws an image with layers of light on the film; similar to colour-field painters, she seeks to explore abstraction, not only to avoid the direct illustration of ideas but also to offer a new perspective.