Getting to k(no)w her

Recently, Intimidad invited me to write, to share some thoughts about her and her project, to be published on the Goethe Institute website. We happened to be on FB Messenger at the same time. As much as one could read into the timing of our back and forth on that channel, she was unsure about asking. You see, we are friends who don’t know each other. How does one ask? A stranger? For a favor? How does a being who presents as a young woman approach an openly CIS het man, online? Guardedly. Cautiously, because, yes, all men.

I had already begun paying attention to Intimidad’s work. It’s smart and funny.

Intimidad presents through her Facebook profile the images of a beautiful life, the highlight reel of young woman.

The images are filtered, as is the current practice, to appear as though they were shot onto 110 film with a Kodak Instamatic pocket camera, which is to say they have a texture and a color gamut similar to the 1970s. I was alive and aware in the 1970s and saw that texture the first time. It evokes immediate nostalgia in me. I have pictures with and by my parents that have that color range. I was given an Instamatic at age 11 to experiment with photography. I have made images with that texture. Later, in college, I saw films by Eric Rohmer, there was that texture again.

Instagram has been around since 2010. That service popularized, made massive, the spontaneous filtering of images to invoke moods. This capability created a new semiotic realm unweighed from historical anchorage. Anytime could be 1975, henceforth. It won’t — doesn’t — mean 1975 anymore. It means 2015 and it means a host of other things that photographers and snapshot takers want it to mean. Intimidad’s use of the palette is as much a signature as the pixelation she also employs to obscure faces in the images she has shared online.

Intimidad is from Bogotá, so we are paisan@s. Her spanish is better than mine. I left when I was three to learn a new culture. She lives in Madrid. She is Spanish-Colombian. She was born March 21st. on the cusp between Pisces and Aries. I’m firmly an Aries. This coincidence doesn’t really provide me with any greater closeness with Intimidad. I cannot really say that our astrological realities are in any sort of cosmic alignment. We may share some memories of Colombian food, arepas, pan de yuca or pan de bono, chicharrones, sancocho, ajiaco. We could bond over these, though it’s equally likely that she is vegetarian. We could then share the safe meal of worldly artists, hummus. We would need to share a meal, you see, to get to know one another. Its a custom Colombians share. We eat with our intimates, and Intimidad and I have catching up to do during the sobremesa. We don’t eat and run. We linger and tell stories. It’s what we do with loved ones, with family.

Intimidad practices impressionistic anonymizing, of herself, her family, her friends, and even her strangers. Some reach the point of absurdity, anonymizing regions of an image that is far in the distance where she or her loved ones might appear, or might have appeared. She’s not using a simple black bar like a censor might, nor a colorful dot from the office supply store like John Baldessari may have done. She is using software of her own design to sample regions and create lower-resolution — pixelated — bands of noise that stand out from and blend in with the compositions. And these are composed. Most often it is a face that is obscured. But, sometimes, it is another body part, if the face is not in the frame. A mark is made, the image framed. An emotion is tweaked. A choice is signaled.

Some of her process makes use of found imagery, from Facebook users with lax privacy settings. Intimidad has transformed these images significantly, and credited her sources. At least one has claimed a violation of privacy, demonstrating a misunderstanding of the the privacy that Intimidad restored to the original public sharing. Sharing is publicity, not privacy. As Intimidad has been demonstrating it is also not intimacy, though the way she does it echoes with many of the textures and feelings of what we now ascribe to that state. Contemporary intimacy on Facebook is the visual equivalent of a stage whisper in theater.

She has battled to prove to Facebook that her name, Intimidad, is real. Let us think about that for a bit. She was asked to show unobscured documentation, a photo ID. Facebook’s Real Names policy is still a nightmare for the trans-gender community, for politically marginalized populations that obscure their identities for reasons of safety, and for artists who work under an identity of choice. She’s shared screen shots with us, since 2011, of the verification process. What kind of preposterous name is “Intimidad”? No one in the english speaking world would ever think of naming their child Faith, or Hope; no one would name their child Consuelo, Dolores, Mercedes, would they? No one ever names a child after an aspiration they hope to see in the world.

Intimidad does and does not want me to get to know her better. She presents me with a cypher, a puzzle. She’s an unreliable narrator of a life online. She’s presenting a kind of alternative to Sterling Crispin’s (anti-)Facial Recognition Data Masks. Both are pushing back against facial recognition algorithms. Intimidad offered us software, for a time, while Sterling gives us provocative sculptural works. Intimidad is political in ways that Facebook doesn’t like. I wish I knew her better.


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Text by Rafael Fajardo

Rafael Fajardo teaches in Electronic Media Art & Design, and Digital Media Studies.
Director, SWEAT collaborative.

Associate Professor in Emergent Digital Practices (EDP)
University of Denver