WYSi-WE: What You See is What Emerged

Social experiences and identities are being reshaped through forces that build, debase and stir. WYSi-WE (What You See is What Emerged) is a series of graphic assemblages created to investigate this idea. Using images from an online photo sharing community, together with text selections, social intersections are explored through assemblage theory and databending (also known as glitching).

Photographs, sourced by keywords related to class, faith, gender, politics and sexuality, are fused together at the level of code bits to graphically expose the influence of one piece of social identity on another. Each assemblage is accompanied by documentation of its text-image parts, and the viewer is invited to read through the compositions in multiple ways. All photographs used under a Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 license.

Read my article about this project in Visual Communication journal


Barness, J. (2015). Social Disruptions: WYSi-WE, What You See is What Emerged. Visual Communication journal, 14(1), pp. 41–48.

2015. Exhibited at Design Latitudes international juried exhibition. University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB.

2014. Build, Debase, Stir: Visualizing Identity through Databending presentation at Kent State University College of Communication and Information Annual Research Colloquium.

© Jessica Barness