Joshua Citarella
Joshua Citarella is an artist, researcher, and Twitch streamer who studies online communities from New York City.[2][3]
Joshua Citarella | |
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Born | 1987 (age 33–34)[1] |
Nationality | American |
Website | joshuacitarella |
Early life and education
Citarella attended the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he learned both traditional darkroom photography and digital techniques on account of the fact that the school was transitioning at the time from for former to the latter.[4]
Work
After graduation, Citarella began collaborating with a collection of artists that concentrated on digital culture and advertising. His ongoing work with Brad Troemel began at this time on the work The Jogging.[4] The Jogging was begun in 2009 as a Tumblr blog on which thousands of strange images were put up. In 2017, Citarella continued his collaboration with Toemel, working with him on an Etsy art store called Ultra Violet Production House. As of January 2017, the two had put up seventy-eight works of art for sale, most of them made of everyday object in a manner that developed a sense of absurdity. For example, a couch covered in hardcore-punk-band patches and a bench built from two Apple computers with a plank of wood were put up for sale.[5]
In 2013, Citarella debuted with a series of five chromogenic still lifes at Higher Pictures. These prints included Body Anointed with Nitroglycerin Awaits Transfiguration, depicting a "reclining nude woman, partially covered in silver, with little flecks of skin and paint floating around her," with some of the nitroglycerin smudging the frame. Andrew Russeth of The Observer describes the work as showing "exacting detail" instilling in viewers a "discomfort [that]...is also a sign that Mr. Citarella is closely attuned to the intricate traps of image production today."[1]
Citarella presented his triptych SWIM A Few Years From Now at that Armory Show. It depicts his vision of a future "anarcho-capitalist" future America. Writing for Artsy, Scott Indrisek notes that the piece displays "a canny blend of analog photography and digital trickery, with many images borrowed from the internet... [it] has the slickness of a dystopian IKEA catalog spread."[4]
In 2017, Citarella was supporting himself with varied freelance and temporary jobs, including photography for New York galleries and editing for commercial images. Citarella has reworked aspects of his freelancing work into his own art pieces.[4]
Citarella's repertoire also includes two books: one of which is called Politigram & the Post-Left, created in 2018, a short version of which is available on his website. The book is a research project that covers the esoteric left-wing movement on Instagram, known as the titular "Politigram". The short version contains screenshots of memes and profiles from the platform. The long version, in addition, "include[s] feedback, interviews, conversations and census data sent by the users themselves." It "was available at a bookstore in the east village of NYC. Somewhere during mid October, a Politigram user visited the store and purchased the book".[6] His other book, from 2020, is called 20 Interviews, which, as implied by the title, is a collection of interviews from users on Politigram.[7] This book is available for order on Citarella's Patreon.[8]
As of 2020, Citarella's main projects are a podcast and a Twitch account, both of which he uses to discuss current events, Politigram subcultures, and studies in the ways that social media affects radicalization.[9][3]
References
- Russeth, Andrew (24 September 2013). "Joshua Citarella at Higher Pictures". Observer. Retrieved 23 May 2020.
- Lorenz, Taylor (29 October 2019). "'OK Boomer' Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations". The New York Times.
- "Twitch". Twitch. Retrieved 2020-10-26.
- Indrisek, Scott (25 February 2017). "Joshua Citarella Is the Ultimate New York Freelancer". Artsy.
- Chen, Adrian (30 January 2017). "The Troll of Internet Art". The New Yorker.
- Citarella, Joshua (2018). Politigram & the Post-left (PDF). New York City.
- Citarella, Joshua. "Joshua Citarella". Archived from the original on October 26, 2020. Retrieved October 26, 2020.
- "Joshua Citarella is creating live-streams on Twitch". Patreon. Retrieved 2020-10-26.
- "Joshua Citarella on Apple Podcasts". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved 2020-10-26.