Laura Paloma

During my residency at hangar.org in Barcelona in 2024, I put up an ad in the street saying: “I am looking for an artistic project to copy. With an interesting process and concept. A finished work that was successful. More info here: laurapaloma012@gmail.com.” I also contacted three local artists asking them if I could copy one of their works. The artists Mario Santamaría, Roc Herms and Julia Gorostidi answered my call and each gave me one of their projects to copy. 
​​ With this work, I am interested in the performative moment where an artist gives me one of their projects to copy ie: “you can copy this”. It is a reflection on the nature of a copy and the act of copying: Will my version of the work be a variation, fan art, a spin-off, a continuation, an imitation? Will the result take the form of a loving parody? A compression? A rip-off? Will it be a clone or back up? Is this the gesture of a meme-maker or that of a software engineer copying source code and forking a project? And if a copy is thought of as worse quality or as less valuable than the original: How can I make my copy purposefully less good than the original work? ​This project is an attempt to be in direct dialogue with an artistic work without the act of appropriation or referencing but instead through that of copying. I have completed 2 of the 3 copies so far. I have recently begun working on my third. Auto Sleep copy (2024) a non-automatic email reply informing you that I am not sleeping. Auto Sleep copy does not always work and forgets to reply to some of my emails. It is a copy of the automatic email reply Auto Sleep by Mario Santamaría. hacer pantallazo copy or My Impersonal Diary Through Screenshots (2024) https://www.flickr.com/photos/201358044@N04/ not-automatically collects, sorts and uploads to flickr my most deletable screenshots. These are screenshots I take for pragmatic reasons and end up deleting because I no longer need them. hacer pantallazo copy or My Impersonal Diary Through Screenshots documents part of my life inside the screen but also recreates the easiest screenshots to copy from Roc Herms’ screenshot diary and mixes them in with my least memorable screenshots. The uploading process is extremely slow and the project is never up to date. Sometimes a more personal screenshot is uploaded by mistake. It is a copy of Hacer Pantallazo (My Personal Diary Through Screenshots) by Roc Herms.

 My personal travel diary through screenshots copy (2024) is a cheap copy of any past or future book publications by Roc Herms involving screenshots and travelling. This publication is composed of screenshots taken by my younger self during a solo trip in 2018. A trip I took in search of life experience and writing material. It is a coming of age tale that revisits the road trip as a photographic genre.

fyp broken (2024), fyp short for “For You Page” on TikTok, speaks of the alienating moment when the reinforcement learning algorithm of TikTok no longer reflects what you have so precisely taught it about yourself, refuses to recognise your individual interests and preferences and for some time forgets everything about you. For You Pages break in moments when the platform tests its new algorithm and pushes new content on its users, seeing if they will respond positively towards it. This glitch – a moment of self-destruction orchestrated by the platform itself – results in finite feeds full of content that users have already seen and liked, triggering an invisible tug and pull between the users and developers of the algorithm, played out by one side viewing, scrolling, liking and pressing the “not interested” button and by the other through the pushing of specific content. Inspired by the presence of CD bird scarers in public and residential areas, the diy recycled CD mobile – composed of CDs, CD-Roms, an emergency blanket and plastic cable covers – is based on a craft idea found on Pinterest and makes reference to kinetic art. As a structure, holding together separate moving parts, it tries to enact the construction of a TikTok feed where videos are connected to each other, lined up in a certain order, defined by the similarity of their metadata, user activity on the app and the user’s account settings. The printed text elements are cut outs from screenshots of videos labeled with #fypbroken where users describe their troubles and share their frustrations with their broken fyp and look for mutual support and resonance with others. All material used in this installation is recycled, used, leftover, and surplus materials or donated to me by friends. This installation was made site-specifically for ring-ring Kunstraum in Zürich, an off-space located in a repurposed Telephone cabin.

how instagram algorithm works (2023) is a meme based on a workflow diagram that illustrates how the Instagram algorithm interacts with posted content. The original diagram is an attempt to visualise why some posts get more visibility than others and serves as a guide for platform users and businesses.

 The meme version of this diagram was posted in 2020 by the surreal meme maker @voidsurrealmemes. In my version of the meme, presented at Prix Photoforum 2023 as an installation – composed of used tarps, window colour paint (incl. glow in the dark), chalk pens, tape – I have extracted texts from my various internet lives, including captions from the Instagram community “same picture everyday accounts” of which I am a part, and created a revisited workflow diagram. With the use of recycled and worn plastic tarps and window colors, most often used in children’s crafts, the project reflects on the materiality of the digital and networked image and text. Through a playful reconfiguration of the workflow diagram, my aim, as artist and user, is to symbolically appropriate and intervene in this corporate workflow, ludicrously revising the corporate decisions made by Meta concerning data usage, content moderation, and censorship. This project questions the structuring of realities and narratives through workflow diagrams and algorithms, as well as makes visible the opaque mechanisms that we, as users of the platform, interact with daily.