Outcome

Intention

How would your peers interpret your art if it were presented in a way that is associated with your identity? 
In this project, I intend on exploring how the Facebook community would react to an abstract art piece with no context other than it being my profile picture. Is this interpretation different from how it would be interpreted in an objective context? Does this line up with my own intent in creating this art? 
The ultimate goal is to determine how my Facebook friends perceive me based on my public profile through their interpretation of my artwork and motive behind publicly posting said artwork. 
Specifically, the artwork I chose is a photograph of a glassful of pills in a brightly lit bathroom. In some interpretations, this may be highly sensitive or controversial material. My motivation behind choosing this photograph is to pinpoint what interpretations my peers come up with, whether they be positive or negative, what they perceive my message within the photograph is, and how they feel towards my choice of content and ultimately me upon changing my profile picture. 

Process

While setting up this "social experiment," I debated between several reactions I was hoping to elicit. My usual profile pictures are primarily selfies with filters, candid solo photos, or semi-professionally shot portraits:

  

Occasionally, I would change my profile picture to support a cause or event that I advocated for, or a casual photo with at most two other close friends or immediately family members:

  
My current profile picture is a semi-professionally shot photo of my boyfriend and I: 

 

Overall, the often unconscious message I seem to portray to my profile viewers is that I am a rather reserved individual who cares a lot about aesthetics, usually only keeps a few very close friends, and is passionate about certain causes. I have never posted an ambiguous photo without context in the description box, much less an abstract artwork with potentially controversial themes. For this reason and also because September is the National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, I decided on a photograph I had recently shot for my digital photography course featuring a glass of blue pills.

Product

  
The theme of the photography assignment was to capture moods during different times of day. This particular picture was taken with a Canon T3i in the mid-afternoon in the bathroom, where the lighting tends to be more ambient. My photographic style tends towards finding beauty or meaning in the small details of daily life, often incorporating discomforting content. While composing the picture, I took a bottle of blue softgel Ibuprofen pills and placed them in a transparent glass, one that I often use to drink water every morning. This was intentional, as when the blue softgels conglomerate at the bottom, I felt that they somewhat resembled water ("drinking pills like water"). I then placed it in my bathroom to signify daily practice. The soap bar ledge that I placed the glass on, clearly too small for the glass, gives off an eerie precariousness of the entire composition. 
Before I posted the picture, I did some light editing on Photoshop, mainly to increase the exposure and clarity of the photo. The above photo is the result after posting it on Facebook (and undergoing mandatory cropping). 

Effect

The first thing that I noticed is that my new profile picture received comparatively much fewer likes compared to my past profile pictures, and nearly no comments except to comment on the artistic factor. However, I did spark some controversy and uneasy, sarcastic remarks among my closest friends in our group Facebook chat and more neutral comments from my high school friends: 

Reflection

Overall, I found this "social experiment" to be relatively successful given the small sample size that is my Facebook circle. As expected, I received a lot of confused responses regarding the macabre nature of my profile picture. However, those who responded were mostly my close friends who did so in private and expressed alarm at my sudden change in disposition. The rest of my Facebook community seemed to pass over the "controversial" picture entirely, or give passive support in the form of a "like." Thus, I conclude that most of the people who browse or use Facebook tend to avoid engaging in controversial topics or any content that is not immediately clear, supporting my generalization that people on Facebook try to moderate or filter their opinions in a way that reaches and satisfies as wide of an audience as possible. If I were to repeat this experiment, I would try to give my profile picture as much exposure as possible, as I imagine with my relative inactivity on Facebook, most of my posts go unnoticed. Consequently, I was not able to gather enough data on the reactions of peers who do not know me as well.