I’m a long time reader of Umair’s blogs, it was quite a surprise to see that he mentioned SuperFuture! Hell yeah! I wonder if he posts his fits!
My favorite example is the What Are You Wearing Today thread at Superfuture, a fashion microcommunity (sorry for the unwanted attention, guys). It?s literally thousands of pages of connected consumers posing, checking each other out, and telling each other if cool brands actually make them cool ? or not.
Superfuture is the small tip of a very large iceberg: the massive defection to hundreds of thousands of social networks and microcommunities, where connected consumers endlessly discuss, debate, and validate brands and their promises.
?From 1980 to 1981, performing artist Teching Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day, for an entire year, to observe the passage of time. My series, entitled What Are You Wearing Today?, is an exercise in time and digital replication. I photographed myself everyday for an entire year, from March 10th, 2007 until March 10th, 2008. Like Teching Hsieh?s Time Piece, I illustrated the passage of time by shaving my head and letting it grow throughout the duration of my work. This subject of transience can also be observed by my jeans, which I have worn every single day to coincide with my growing hair. Both elements signify change and growth that conformed to my body throughout this year-long piece.
This series examines the digital era and how we interact with others in the 21st Century. Popular examples of this self-documentation can be seen with photographer Noah Kalina?s video, Everyday, that garnered over eight million views on YouTube and his six year self-portrait video has even been subject to parody in the animated series, The Simpsons. Now, more than ever, digital imagery has become a readily accessible tool for communicating and sharing ideas.
What Are You Wearing Today? derives from Superfuture, an online resource for global travelers and shoppers. Alongside an appreciation for Japanese-made artisan reproductions of American jeans, W.A.Y.W.T., a clothing thread within Superfuture?s message board, spans thousands of pages containing photographs documenting what Superfuture?s users are wearing. While creating this work, I actively participated in this daily ritual and even went so far as to meet other users in real life around New York City, Boston, and San Francisco. Since merging online posting with real-life interaction, this work imbues the natural process of evolution in communities such as Superfuture in ways that reflect on the direction of our emerging technologies and grapple with the delicate balance between analog and digital resources in our daily lives.”