Patterns looks at overlapping patterns of self-representation and self-camouflage, doing so by re-photographing profile images of users on dating apps who are located in areas where the use of such platforms is restricted and risky. Following a chance online encounter with a person living under an ultra-religious regime, Mittwoch sought to explore the nature of participation in popular dating platforms where they are tightly monitored and surveilled. How would the visual codes of self-representation – such that, aesthetically, are already in place – carry over to an online profile when measures of obscuring and camouflage become necessary? And how do they vary from place to place?
Using encoded VPN technology, Mittwoch set his IP address to a specified GPS location, coming into contact with other users who, from their side, apply a host of non-tracking plugins to camouflage their actual location and identity. The platforms in question are designed to bring about an encounter in real life. However, despite the fact that those users might never use the platforms to such an end, the profiles they set up project their identity in ways that go beyond the purely informative.
Regardless of gender, such users risk very real consequences just by accessing those platforms. In the face of such restrictions, they create online visual presences that, with cropping and close-ups, vacillate between appearance and disappearance, encryption and manifestation. Mittwoch positioned a close-range camera as near as possible to the surface of a smart-phone screen, capturing the thumbnail-sized encrypted identities projected from behind the glass of the display, together with shadow-like marks of finger smudges. The resulting images, now large-scale and abundant with visual data, conceal all the more the identity of the personae represented in them; it is as though the closer we get, the more the persona evades us.
The action of re-photographing tampers with the readability of the initial visual data, designed to be viewed on a screen; the figure hence disintegrates. The series exacerbate the tension contained in these images between signals of social and visual readability and the camouflage function inherent to them. In a way, both are used for neutralizing any trace of subjectivity. As the adequate correlation between visual data and the led projection breaks, so does our ability to recognize the initial figure; and we are left not with an unidentified figure, but rather an idea of a figure. In this sense, these profiles – born of a need to participate in today’s online platforms despite social stigma and interdiction – manifest an alternative mode of asserting oneself in an interconnected world of social media.

In this new body of works, Matan Mittwoch continues his exploration of the technological tools that surround us and the control devices that they include. The artist aims at triggering a question concerning personalization and its limits in virtual domains, as well as it reflections on enforcement and freedom. By using rather common photographic processes, he manages to expose the tension between material and virtual, actual and fictional, genuine and staged reaching into the most basic questions humanity asks itself today regarding reality and interconnectivity.

The photography series ‘Patterns’ examines self-representation and self- camouflage, doing so by re-photographing the profile images of users on dating websites who live in areas where the use of such platforms is forbidden or carries a heavy personal risk. Using encoded VPN technology (virtual private network), Mittwoch sets his IP address to a specified GPS location, coming into contact with other users who, from their side, apply a host of non-tracking plugins to camouflage their actual location and identity. The resulting images, now large-scale and abundant with visual data, conceal all the more the identity of the persona represented in them; it is as though the closed we get, the more the persona evades us. These profiles - born out of the need to participate in today’s online platforms despite social stigma and interdiction - manifest an alternative mode of asserting oneself in this world of global media.