Mot HaSelfie
Digital sculpture installation, mixed media, 2015
“Chen Serfaty created a futuristic monument of sorts, comprised of selfie sticks and smartphones. Rather than face the audience, as one would expect, the phones photograph one another automatically and blindly. The resulting image bring to mind a hermetic, poetic, and melancholic moon, a “dead selfie” of sorts. The inability or “unwillingness” of the devices to photograph the audience, playfully hints at a possibility of a future machines rebellion against the narcissistic mankind. Serfaty’s gaze into the future is in fact an allegory for the present: in the age of the selfie, with its surge of meaningless, practically identical, images, you document and share therefor you are. The selfie stick and the smartphone at it’s end have become a second arm of sorts, an extension of the body and of the eye. The selfie, a new genre of portrait photography that reshaped human social behavier, has also become a symbol of the growing loneliness in the post- Internet world. The more we share in the virtual world, the more isolation and alienation we experienced in the real world.”
Voice Over 2048 exhibition, Manofim Festival, Jerusalem / Curators: Maayan Sheleff, Rinat Edelstein, Lee He Shulov