DeviantArt: Data and the divided self

This article explores the construction and exchange of socially mediated illustrations specifically via the online platform DeviantArt (DA). DA describes itself as ‘the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts, a platform for emerging and established artists to exhibit, promote and share their works with an enthusiastic, art-centric community’. As part of DA’s mission statement is the aim to create not only a space for the exchange of artworks but also the ambitious goal of creating a new cultural context for these images. The aim of this article is to unpick this cultural context to reflect on a wider social and cultural activity concerning public and private space. Drawing relevance to the Internet subcultures that embraced the platform as well as contemporary inclinations associated with ownership and jurisdiction of public spaces, this article explores notions of ownership that regard not just the work itself, but also the empathetic and emotional space of the work’s construction. Epitomised within DA’s platform is creative action and the creative persona as commodified dataset. DA’s users are indexed, exchanged and surveilled as datasets; identities divided into constituent parts. Of interest here is the decline of the platform and its current attempts to stay relevant in the embrace of AI generated imagery. In the promotion of such imagery and the use of artworks and interactions as training data for AI models, what we have now is a permeating network of post-user data, potentially bypassing the need for DA’s dwindling active userbase.