The Unjust Mirror | Constant Dullaart

In the analysis of what Internet-based art represents, there are three characteristics that appear most evident: the performativity of the medium, the freedom to choose to act in this specific context, the participation of the viewer, who is also the user.

For This Unjust Mirror, Consant Dullaart creates hundreds of fake Instagram accounts, and then uses them in a diffused performance to post a poem based on a monologue in ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ by Edgar Allan Poe throughout the internet. Dullaart then archives online every profile and every post in order to keep them visible. ‘This unjust mirror’ is what Dorian Gray calls his portrait, the reflection of his soul. According to Dullaart, Internet is the mirroring portrait of our society, where disinformation and propaganda are embedded in every post. The artist examines the social media and uses them as laboratories to study some social phenomena: the desperate need to be liked, approved and reposted, the thirst for followers, so powerful that sometimes it is possible to pay for this kind of appreciation. In an environment where opinions become facts and trends become propaganda Constant Dullaart tests social networks users by challenging their fruition, showing them how easy it is to be fooled and deceived. He manipulates the use of images, sound, information, up to the very environment in which these contents are offered.

Let’s forget all these things can be still made in our offline dimension. Like there’s still one.

Constant Dullaart, This Unjust Mirror, 2020
©️Constant Dullaart
2/11/2020