Art World Academics

#Blessed

#Blessed brings together 8,000 digital Instagram snaps, all taken in a single day and presents them IRL (in real life). Curator, Christin Aucunas, mined Instagram for images with #blessed, a hashtag that has been used over 34 million times since Instagram’s inception. Users classify their own sense of "#blessed" making the content wildly diverse from the spiritual to the profane. In a community as unique and as global as Instagram’s users, what is our collective view of #blessed in a world where the secular and spiritual often strain to exist together? The exhibition does not seek to offer any definite answer to these questions, but offers  a visual trace of the curators own adventures in the digital photographic playground.

Articles and Talks

“The .gif: The File that Won the Internet”

UMOCA, Salt Lake City, Ut | March 2017

.gif animation is everywhere. It’s a quick and easy form of communication that permeates a seemingly inexhaustible array of online communities, including forums and comment sections to major brands and advertisers to, now, the art museum. How did this simple, lo-fi form of communication become so ubiquitous? This talk will explore the underlying factors and structures that elevated an element of kitschy web design to a powerful tool of connection.

Funny, Tragic, Ambiguous: The Life and Career of Elliott Erwitt

Kimball Art Center, Park City, Ut | March 2017

The Kimball Art Center, 638 Park Ave., will present an art talk, "Funny, Tragic, Ambiguous: The Life and Career of Elliott Erwitt," by photography historian Christin Aucunas on Tuesday, June 10. The program will run from 6 p.m. until 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The talk coincides with the Kimball Art Center’s exhibit "Dog Dogs" by Erwitt that is on display in the Main Gallery.

Point, Click, Post, Cut, Paste, Share:  Appropriation of Web-Based Imagery in Contemporary Photobooks

With Distinction, University of Manchester | Summer 2013

Despite all the changes to the photographic medium, I would argued that the way in which people relate and read photography has not altered in a fundamental way. Web 2.0 has provided a platform for which images are exchanged, shared and disseminated. I will explored the reading of photography through three technologies: Social Media Websites, Google and Google Street View.