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• The artwork
• The online game
Totem Triptychs:
The Early Social Media Experiment
The 1998 “Totem Triptych” online collaboration was a precursor to Instagram that
started in 2010. Swartzentruber avoided making each painting with authorial
intent. Instead he designed the work primarily as stream of consciousness. He
reached out to the writing community to contextualize the meaning of the art.
Viewers emailed submissions describing the paintings. Within days these
“texters” could see their post on-line next to the artwork.
Swartzentruber’s vision was an early form of social media. This online
collaboration was done in 1998, the year Google was
founded. This social media experiment was six years before the introduction
of Facebook. Some authors wrote about one painting. Two
contributors, Marc Harshman (Poet Laureate of West Virginia), and British
wordsmith Cleveland W. Gibson wrote text for all 36 triptychs. Commenting
about online images is now a daily routine.
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