In Selfie Aesthetics Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by trans feminist artists, Morse details a set of formal strategies they call selfie aesthetics: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Morse traces these strategies in the work of Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, and Natalie Wynn, showing how these artists present improvisational identities and new modes of performative resistance by conveying the materialities of trans life. Morse shows how the interaction between selfie creators and viewers constructs collective modes of being and belonging in ways that envision trans feminist futures. By demonstrating the aesthetic depth and political potential of selfie creation, distribution, and reception, Morse deepens understandings of gender performativity and trans experience.

Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans women feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore how selfies produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers in ways that envision trans feminist futures.

This volume investigates our dissonant and exuberant existences online. As social media users we know we’re under surveillance, yet we continue to click, like, love and share ourselves online as if nothing was. So, how do we overcome the current online identity regime? Can we overthrow the rule of Narcissus and destroy the planetary middle class subject? In this catalogue of strategies, the reader will find stories on hacker groups, gaming platforms in the occupied territories, art objects, selfies, augmented reality, Gen Z autoethnographies, love and life. The authors of this anthology believe we cannot simply put vanity aside and a rational analysis of platform capitalism is not going to convince the youngs on TikTok nor liberate us from Zuckerbergian indentured servitude. Do we really need to wade through the subjective mud and ‘learn more’ about online aesthetics? The answer is yes. Writing by Wendy Chun, Franco Berardi “BIFO”, Julia Preisker, Katherine Behar, Rebecca Stein, Fabio Cristiano, Emilio Distretti, Natalie Bookchin, Ana Peraica, Mitra Azar, Donatella Della Ratta, Gabriella Coleman, Marco Deseriis, Alberto Micali, Daniel de Zeeuw, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Jodi Dean.

With coverage of the entire research process in social media, data collection and analysis on specific platforms, and innovative developments in the field, this handbook is the ultimate resource for those looking to tackle the challenges that come with doing research in this sphere.

Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments can exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues.

In the year 2013, ‘selfie’ was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in recognition of dramatic changes in frequency, prominence, and register of the term. This drastic increase in selfie-taking was spurred by two factors. The first was the advent of smartphones equipped with front cameras and preview screens that made it easy to compose a photographic self-portrait by a process of deliberately exploring one’s image, choosing a pose, and finally taking the picture. The second key change contributing to the rise of the selfie age was the increasing availability of internet connections. It is estimated that about 50% of the world population has access to the internet today (2018; https://www.internetworldstats.com). At the end of the past century, this percentage was a mere 1%. The growth of the internet infrastructure simultaneously spurred the development of social network applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, providing accessible media for sharing photographs including photographic self-portraits. However, despite their tremendous reach and popularity, selfies have so far received relatively little attention by the scientific community, especially within psychology. Thus, we proposed a Frontiers in Psychology Research Topic to expand empirical and theoretical work on the massively popular, yet scientifically unexplored, phenomenon of the selfie. The articles published in this eBook offer a multifaceted insight into current scholarly work on this topic.

This volume explores the relationship between aesthetics and traditional multimodal communication to show how all semiotic resources, not just those situated within fine arts, have an aesthetic function. Bringing together contributions from an interdisciplinary group of researchers, the book meditates on the role of aesthetics in a broader range of semiotic resources, including urban spaces, blogs, digital scrapbooks, children’s literature, music, and online learning environments. The result is a comprehensive collection of new perspectives on how communication and aesthetics enrich and complement one another when meaning is made with semiotic resources, making this key reading for students and scholars in multimodality, fine arts, education studies, and visual culture.