Best Friends by Colin Pinegar
Colin Pinegar explores a rarely-considered side of the social media explosion of recent times with ‘Best Friends’, a visual tracing of just how close we are to who we call our online ‘friends’.
“Since the advent of Facebook, the meaning of the word “friend” seems to have lost its meaning. I wanted to see just how many of my online “friends” would actually fit the pre-Facebook definition of the word.” – Colin Pinegar, creator of Best Friends.
After many hours of research, it became clear to Colin that the more two people communicated – especially offline, in a format that was not merely text – the stronger their relationship was. Colin then created a survey that measured the amount of contact he had with his friends over the past year. Each friend scored somewhere between 1 and 25 points, and each score was assigned a color on a spectrum. A bust was then cast in soy wax and dyed according to the score. Pink busts were ‘friends’, working its way to purple busts for ‘best friends’.
What does this mean for our lives, nowadays so easily conducted and managed online? For Colin, it is a visual representation of who he considers to be his ‘best friends’; for us, it can make us re-evaluate exactly who we really know online, and possibly even force us to put down the keyboard, and pick up the phone instead.
