Amalia Ulman: Fotolog, Instagram and the Economy of Looking Good
Life after Fotolog and Instagram as performance art
I sat down with pioneering net artist and filmmaker Amalia Ulman to talk about Fotolog, a now-defunct image sharing platform popular in the early 2000s in Spain and South America. We also spoke about her practice and the evolution of online aesthetics.
For context, Fotolog was founded in 2002 with the goal of building a “good” social network. Much like BeReal, it only allowed users to post once a day and comments were also limited for non-paying users. The platform became a spawning ground for many subcultural groups like the Pokemones in Chile and Floggers in Argentina and Uruguay.
Amalia wrote an amazing essay about the platform and its influence in 2012. I did too in print for Digital Frontier last year.
One of my favorite parts of the interview is our discussion of Fotocumbia, a bootleg, user-built version of Fotolog that emerged from the margins of Argentine digital culture. Developed by working-class youth in the villas of Buenos Aires, Fotocumbia was a true act of technological sovereignty. Built in response to the aesthetic and social exclusion found on mainstream and sterile platforms like Fotolog, Fotocumbia allowed for uncensored expression, embedded music, and a freer, more chaotic visual language. It became the digital home of Cumbia Villera, a subculture defined by its embrace of “grassa” or “greasy,” the vulgar, and the proudly lowbrow, an aesthetic deliberately rejected by the urban elite. I have spent the last few years researching user-owned and user-built platforms as well as trying to build one with FWB. At the time, one of the theses was that we needed new primitives, i.e. Web3 to make it happen. The example of Fotocumbia from a decade ago is proof that the desire for sovereignty is more cultural than it is technological.
We also spoke about "Excellences and Perfections", a 4-month long durational Instagram performance in which Amalia staged the life of a fictional influencer across three aesthetic arcs: kawaii girl, influencer baddie, and hippie wellness devotee.
Overall, we explore:
The history of Fotolog
The queer and DIY spirit of photoblogging
The rise of Fotocumbia, a bootleg net archive for working-class youth in South America
Her transition into filmmaking with El Planeta and her newest film Magic Farm, starring Chloe Sevigny, Simon Rex and Alex Wolff
Magic Flower opens in New York on April 25th.