ABSTRACT
Los Angeles-based artist, writer and filmmaker Kate Durbin has a keen interest in how societal forces behind technological development shape human experience.1 Her performance art projects include Hello Selfie, The Supreme Gentleman and Cloud 9, which investigate the many gendered aspects of online behavior and performance rhetorics in relation to social media and the internet. Durbin’s book ABRA is a “living text” experiment of twenty-first-century bookmaking—winning the 2017 Turn on Literature Prize for electronic literature—and she was a Digital Studies fellow with Rutgers-Camden University in 2018. With the social very much embedded in her practice, Durbin is arguably one of the first artists to start working with the phenomenon of selfies. To introduce this section, we focus on Hello Selfie, an iterative public performance art intervention (2012–2015), which coincided with the word “selfie” being dubbed the 2013 Oxford word of the year. Durbin ends with her most recent work Unfriend Me Now! (2018–2019), which features a Facebook clown and explores political polarization during the US presidential election campaign.2
