What do you see when you look at our current Zeitgeist? Socially, a lot has changed nowadays, compared to the 90s. Back then there were no smart phones or mobile phones. Internet was only just making its way into society and new friends were made at school or out on the street. Today new friends can be found on the internet, through social media. This means you can be friends with some who lives in another city, another country or even on the other side of the world, in a single day. With simply one hit on the button “add friend”. The more friends you have, the more you get to see of other peoples’ lives. They, on the other hand, get to see your life too. You can exchange ideas, thoughts, feelings and experiences really quickly. The responses of your friends give you acknowledgement. It gives you the idea that someone is seeing you. And not unimportant: you create your own picture. A picture, a window that people can look through and see your “life”. Having lots of friends and a busy life isn’t always easy to combine in real life. On the internet it is possible to communicate and keep in touch with many, many people at once. To have over a thousand friends is quite an easy thing to do on social media. All these friends have their own created “picture”. In my work “A wall of friends” I have printed those pictures literally as shields and built a wall with them. The more friends you have, the bigger the wall will be around you. On one hand, this could be seen as something pleasant, on the other hand it could be seen as a negative development. It is not up to me to have an opinion about this. The viewer himself knows the size of his or her own wall, and also what the colour of that wall may be.
