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Inspired by Aby Warburg’s titanic visual atlas, – the oldest form of moodboard to date – The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
In this chapter of The Mnemosyne, Manhattan-born painter Wallace Dibble takes us on a journey through a selection of digital fragments she has recovered from Flickr, a platform for photographers that was especially popular in the early 2000s, which the artist describes as a kind of unacknowledged social media.
Traces of romantic relationships, friendships, and hidden stories lie beneath personal archives filled with photographs shared on users’ Flickr profiles. To crystallise these moments — so fragile, suspended between the possibility of oblivion and the hyper-visibility of the online world — Dibble creates compositions that capture the full intensity of adolescence and college life, as seen through the lens of digital cameras in the indie sleaze era.
WD: In my work, I usually take images found on Flickr, cutting and pasting them together through painting to form storylines. Through this process, I have been able to take an intimate look at specific Flickr users and their friends’ lives. While many users use the platform as a one-off dumping ground for their camera roll, a minority of them have been regularly updating their accounts for upwards of 15 years. It’s difficult to understand what drives some of these users’ commitment to sharing. The line between storage and expression appears blurred. Long-term users tend to follow the same progression; They have a shitty handheld camera that they take to college parties, while some upgrade to DSLRs by the time they finish school. After a couple of years, the party turns into dinner, and the remaining partygoers turn into houseguests.
Slowly, the camera is brought to work conferences and hikes. Usually, around this time, the original college girlfriend or boyfriend of the user is dumped, in other cases, they get married. Some users move to Brooklyn and continue to go to parties, others move to the Bay for a better job in tech. Usually, around 2014 and 2017, the photos stop.
While my image archive has over 10,000 images, today I am going to share a few of my favourites.
WD: The idea of the American College campus, specifically Greek life, has been a huge source of inspiration in my recent work. Given that college is often seen as the time before adulthood fully sets in, many students try to make use of their limited time by roleplaying actions and images that they’ve seen in the movies and on TV. I’m particularly interested in the processes that sororities and fraternities use, whether hazing or what is called the “big-little” system, to create a sense of brother or sisterhood. Although hazing has been fairly criticised for at times being overly cruel, I think there’s something interesting in the primal want to prove oneself.
WD: The majority of kegstands last between 30 and 40 seconds. Typically, three people are needed to help someone do a kegstand, two to support the legs and a third to hold a tap to the kegstander’s mouth.
WD: There’s a huge genre of “the next morning” photos, really popularised in the late 2000s, early 2010s, with the rise of films like Project X 2012 and Superbad 2007. Think guy duct taped to the wall or someone asleep with Sharpie all over their face. I’m really interested in the competitiveness of one-upping the reenacted debauchery.
WD: “I ended up cutting up a lot of snowflakes for school this year. These are a few of them”
I went to a Christmas party last year where a bunch of drunk people sat in the corner making paper snowflakes. I love how intimate and quiet this photo is. Although you can’t see the person who made the snowflakes, you can tell a lot about their demeanour.
WD: I like that no one in this photo is aware of the camera.
WD: For several weeks in August, Kate and Moga make brief appearances at parties in their friend Mike’s account. From what I can tell from the 35 photos of them together, they meet as partygoers and end up coupled. After August 2005, they completely stopped appearing in Mike’s photos. I have no idea where they ended up and if they are still together.
WD: Hosting requires a lot of ad hoc problem-solving. The garbage bag punch bowl gets the job done.
