“Going against the grain of our hooked-up, online and wired-in world, Petersham artist Grace Kingston is urging people to get real.

She’s taking her latest exhibition, a tongue-in-cheek blending of new media and very, very old media, to New York next month and is urging people to think about the consequences of their online persona.

She’s made extensive use of new and social media in pervious exhibitions but it was during an art residency in rural Finland last year she got the idea of trying to capture social media in an older medium – rocks.

She carved various social media signs including the “@” symbol, #s, Twitter’s “retweet” arrow symbol and even a Twitter bird into moss growing on rocks in a forest and then photographed them.

She’ll be taking Like, her collection of the photos, to New York to exhibit in Brooklyn from February 15.

“The forest itself was like something out of a fairytale, these beautiful Finnish forests with these rocks covered by this lush, green moss – and I was thinking” ‘I should take photos of this for Facebook’,” she said.

“Instead of freely looking at the things around us, we’re trying to tell a story with profile pictures and status updates. You go to a gig and everyone has a camera phone that they’re watching through, instead of actually watching the band- it’s all a bit: ‘If a Tweet falls in the woods and no one can hear it – does it make a sound?”

–  Tyron Butson: Jan 31, 2013 

You can view the original publication here.