Ata "Toast" Bozaci - Beautiful Facebook / Fifteen seconds of fame: Lorrainestrasse, Bern

With an air of cultivated nonchalance, today’s hipster snaps a selfie with his smartphone, posts it on Facebook instantly and awaits the virtual thumbs-up from his friends across the globe.Exhibitionism to this degree was inconceivable before the birth and subsequent popularity of social media. When Andy Warhol exclaimed in 1968 that everyone would get their «fifteen minutes of fame» in the future, he could not have imagined today’s fast-paced world of micro-moments. Our attention span has shrunk so dramatically since Warhol’s time that his fifteen minutes have been shortened to fifteen seconds of fame.

By exploring the theme of self-representation in social media, Ata Bozaci follows tradition of artists reflecting on personal events and societal developments in their work. Social media plays an integral role in contemporary society for various reasons: the sheer amount of time we spend

on it, how we use it to define ourselves, and how it shapes our visual culture. Ata Bozaci took the logical step to explore their content as well as their digital techniques.

This book is a composite of Ata Bozaci’s digital portraits of Facebook friends – with a grinning macaque monkey thrown in for good measure – along with their views on social media. His portraits emphasize an iconic aspect of social media culture, the portrait photographs serving as user profile pictures on social media sites. Using full-frontal portrait shots to focus on his subjects’ facial features, the artist has successfully assembled a gallery of faces, or quite literally, a «face book».

Ata Bozaci’s art blurs the lines between virtual and physical by extracting the portrait photographs from their original context, the world of social

media, then places them in distinctly concrete settings: in print and on walls. The artist reverses the conventional process of digitalizing a sketch

on paper, by manually reproducing large-scale versions of his digitally-designed artwork in public spaces.

The artist and graphic designer Ata Bozaci, or «Toast», as he is popularly known in graffiti circles, was born in Burgdorf (Switzerland) to Turkish parents. He was educated in Switzerland and graduated with a degree in graphic-design in 1996.

Ata Bozaci is a truly versatile artist and moves comfortably across a wide spectrum of artistic techniques and media: from drawings to large-scale murals, traditional canvas paintings, graphic art to modular sculptures. His works were based on by classic graffiti writing; by the 1990s, the artist extended this field to embrace three-dimensional graffiti writing. He has been at the forefront of the international street art movement ever since

and continues to push the boundaries.

Fifteen Seconds of Fame is the artist’s second monograph. The first, Black Ink, was published in 2007.