Photography

Item Description

Lori Hepner (American, b. 1981)
@cnnbrk, 10 May via web #Memphis and New Orleans brace for
historic flooding http://on.cnn.com/lJkON2, from  Status Symbols, 2011
Archival pigment print
Image: 22 x 22 inches matted
Edition: 1/10
Signed and dated back of image in pencil

Lori Hepner was recently featured on the prestigious Time Magazine blog, LightBox, on August 26, 2011. In the article, Neil Harris glowingly writes about her Status Symbols series.

"As we spend more and more of our lives on computers, the evidence of our relationships are recorded in an ever-expanding sea of bits and bytes. How to represent our digitized relationships visually presents a particular challenge to photographers, but Pittsburgh-based artist Lori Hepner has devised an ingenious—and mesmerizing—approach. In her ongoing series Status Symbols, she makes portraits of individual posts on Twitter.

The devices used to make the pictures (custom built over several months by Hepner herself, and programmed with the help of collaborators) consist of a spinning strip of eight LED lights that flash different colors and patterns based on the binary code of each character in a given tweet. Each character in a tweet blinks once, and a tweet of up to 140 characters takes about 3.5 seconds to appear. Hepner then uses a medium-format film camera on a tripod to photograph the device.”

While each tweet is a unique reflection of the specific data in the tweet, the resulting images are abstracted enough that the language cannot be read or inferred from the content of the image. In the same way that a traditional photographic portrait only captures someone’s likeness for a brief moment, each image from Status Symbols is just one fraction of someone’s virtual persona.

About The Artist

Lori Hepner is an assistant professor of integrative arts at Penn State University, Greater Allegheny Campus. She received an MFA in digital media from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Hepner's work has been featured in exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including, PhotoEspaña, Madrid, Spain; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA; Louise Jones Brown Gallery, Duke University, Durham, NC;  and Lishui International Photgraphy Festival, Lishui, China.

Hepner has presented two Artist Talks at TEDx Leadership events in Pittsburgh and Penn State University, State College, PA and received Heinz Fellowships for two Artist-in Residences at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.