Ilga Leimanis

This project addresses the explosion of technological mediation in our relationships with one another, the possibility of meaningful human interaction and the places it occurs. Where and how do we interact? In public, private, or virtual space? The phenomena of on-line social networking, and the website  draugiem.lv in particular, has inspired this series: small painted portraits of my friends' friends taken from their images posted on draugiem.lv. Attracted by the photographs people choose for themselves online, I was drawn to their rhetorical clarity, their earnestness and amateur-ness.  Especially interested in a new extended online community of friends' friends, this series can be read as a social portrait of an extended community.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a seminar was held on 30 July 2009 at the science, art and literature  initiative e-t+t. The seminar speakers presented and discussed the various threads of this theme from the perspectives of art, psychology, new media, communications, sociology and anthropology. They included RICX New Media Centre Director Rasa Smite, Latvia University Pshychology Research Laboratory Director Ivars Austers and student researchers Kaspars Vīgulis (LU), Iveta Sondore (RSU), Nauris Grass (LU) and Jānis Buholcs (LU).

Together with design studio H2E, we are presently fundraising for a small publication.

http://www.diena.lv/lat/izklaide/maksla/personas/varbut-jus-tur-esat
http://www.nra.lv/zinas/26418-profils-1-profils-2.htm