Profile Picture by Mark Farid

Arebyte is happy to present ‘Profile Picture’, an interactive installation by the artist Mark Farid, challenging our relationship with social media and our online presence. The project looks at the commodification of our online activities by digital bodies such as Facebook and Google and the lack in our understanding of their role in in a capitalistic power orientated systems.

These two mega-corporations have transformed the world as we know it:
Facebook replaced many of our social activities from the most basic one of verbal dialogue to the more complex ones of making new connections whilst Google is practically in control of our informal education and knowledge in general, and all that is placed somewhere in the skies, far from our reach, close to their use.
The power of the digital is increasing with no slowing down in sight, but where are we standing in relation to this rapid growth? Are we to sit idly by as it continues to feed our fictional social desires, or shall we question this ever growing reality?

Farid invites us to experience this relationship with the invisibility of the digital and asks us to question the medium and the changes it brings.