bikini bandits data darlings internet it* girls
While shopping for something insignificant on eBay.com, one of the internet’s many virtual second-hand marketplaces, I stumbled upon a post selling a mannequin. There was something strangely vulnerable about this naked piece of humanoid Plastic. It was photographed using obscure angles intended to show details and design features, showing off the product, and there were millions more, all these fake people. The resemblance was uncanny.
Perhaps these mannequins could serve as a metaphor for our digital selves? We are not the customers of social media; the advertisers are; we are the mannequins designed to be manipulated and positioned as desired in order to attract maximum profit.
The book, ‘The Extreme Self: Age of You’, co-written by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulich Obrist was a key reference. Communication has become a currency. Mannequins exist for the sole purpose of selling products: passive advertising. When using online services, we become the same, like data mannequins, unknowingly ‘wearing’, promoting and endorsing brands and mega corporations, all as a by-product of innocent communication.
Shumon Basar, the graphic designer of The Extreme Self explains his design choices: “When you take material or content that you’re so used to seeing on a screen, then you re-format it, put it onto paper and put it on a white background, it’s as though you see it for the very first time’. This would become the premise behind the project. The simple act of taking these images out of context allows us to step back and zoom out.
I was intent on designing a simple, ‘show and tell’ layout; not over explained, allowing the images to purposefully sit contextless, looking back at the viewer like a reflection of themselves. Eva Zirker’s zine titled Jou! was a major inspiration. Again, the premise is simple: she collates and prints all email correspondence she has ever exchanged with her father, she is not presenting the information with a didactic tone or a subjective lens.
Jou! prompted me to notice the language in the product descriptions of the mannequins; it was unexpectedly amusing and almost absurd. Inspired, I drafted some titles for my publication. Given the purposefully contextless inner pages, the viewer would be dependent on the title to communicate as much meaning as possible.
Inspired by the ad-hoc nature of the product descriptions, I ultimately decided on Bikini Bandits Data Darlings Internet It* Girls. The title has a tongue-in-cheek approach; it intends to be wry and witty, cheekily hinting at the indistinguishability between these images and how we present and ‘sell’ our ‘plastic’ selves online. The image used for the cover symbolises how the internet sometimes feels like a giant virtual shop window through which we dissociate and view ourselves and others as plastic humans with detachable limbs and airbrushed faces.
The publication is meant to feel punchy, bold, unflinching and self-assured. The viewer should be able to pick it up and flick through freely, enthusiastically and quickly, almost like scrolling or changing from tab to tab.