Mark Cypher

Self Portrait with 9gb of Personal Google Data moves beyond the idea of digital identity as something we shape ourselves, revealing how our online selves are entangled with vast streams of personal data and ongoing digital processes. Built from 9 gigabytes of the artist’s own Google data, the work draws on Quinn’s notion of the ‘unself’: a self that is never complete, ‘a transitional, non-representational sense of an othered “self”’ that emerges through digital processes. The piece took several years to resolve. Its code had to be rewritten several times, the data was incorrectly formatted, and on more than one occasion the work stalled, so that its final form was, in Cypher’s words, ‘hard won.’ That struggle is part of the work itself, which embodies ‘the contingent push and pull of practice within digital media.’ The result is a portrait that never settles into a likeness, a reminder that our data-selves are always unfinished, shaped by networks over which we have little control.