Unfriend Me Now!

In Unfriend Me Now! (video, 2018-2019) Durbin collected numerous Facebook status updates about the 2016 US Presidential election from both Republicans and Democrats, all of which included the phrase “unfriend me now.” These status updates became the script for Unfriend Me Now!, where Durbin imagines Facebook becoming flesh, in the form of a trickster “Facebook Clown.” Unfriend Me Now! transforms Facebook into an hellscape of comic and horrific endless soapboxing and rage, a place of eternal polarization and algorithmically infected language, and moods.

After excerpts of this work were posted on Facebook in 2018, Facebook headquarters contacted Durbin, requesting for her to come in and share her thoughts on Facebook with them. She did not reply to their request. Later, in 2020, in the months leading up to the next Presidential election in the US, Facebook contacted Durbin again requesting for her to be a part of an academic study about Facebook’s effect on the upcoming election. They offered to pay her approximately $20 if she would de-activate her account through the election. Again, she did not reply to their request.

Durbin created Unfriend Me Now! as a Digital Studies fellow with Camden-Rutgers University in 2017-2018; it was first presented at OMO art space in Berlin in collaboration with peer to space gallery, and curator Tina Sauerländer; it has also been presented at Projektraum Galerie M in Berlin, for the group exhibition POLE, curated by Elena Kaludova. A 3-channel version of Unfriend Me Now! was screened with Transfer Gallery’s DOWNLOAD for Spring Break Art Fair curated by Kelani Nichole, in Hard Disk Museum in Brazil, and at Femmebit Art Festival in Los Angeles, curated by Sharsten Plenge, Kate Parsons, & Danh Gim.

The piece exists in a single-channel narrative version (20 mins) and a clown-scape multi-channel version (loop).

Press:

Interview with The Massachusetts Review

Interview with The Drawing Room (ABC Australia)

Curated in Hard Disk Museum

Durbin: For Unfriend Me Now, I imagined what it would be like to be physically imprisoned eternally in Facebook as a kind of hell. In my work I often re-imagine digital spaces as more fully or explicitly physical as I think a lot about how the digital and analogue are both real spaces that infect one another and create a new reality we increasingly cannot escape.