Photo via: The National Post
Bad news to all those who had found their picture-perfect angle: writer and artist Douglas Coupland has announced in the Financial Times that the next generation of selfies is going to be in 3D. Goodbye pictures, hello busts.
Taking the rise of the 3D printer into account, Coupland considers what this technology is going to mean in our quest for the ultimate form of self-representation. “Will there be even more selfies in the future? Yes! Billions more, but the next selfie wave is going to be the 3D selfie, one in which one scans oneself and then prints out one’s 3D effigies,” he writes in the FT. He has even coined a name for this social phenomenon yet to come: “It’s like photography posing as sculpture–a 2½th dimension.”
Coupland, it’s worth mentioning, has nothing against selfies. On the contrary, he seems to find the whole thing empowering in a Joseph Beuys’s “every-man-is-an-artist” kind of way. “[Selfies] allow all of us to pose and put forth a model of who we think we are, as opposed to who we actually are. And what’s wrong with that? Artists have been doing it for thousands of years─and in the 21st century, with all of this kick-ass new technology we’re all, if nothing else, artists.”
Artistic agency and technological progress are all well and good, but the thorny question of finding the best 3D pose remains. After years perfecting #duckfaces and peace sign poses in front of the mirror, here we are, back to square one. Better start practising.