Ed Fornieles and Britney Rivers

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Britney Rivers, star of Ed Fornieles’s new site www.maybenewfriends.com, courtesy of the artist

social media

interview by ARIELLA WOLENS
photography by BEN KENNEDY

 

Beyond the gilded Hollywood Hills lies the Los Angeles suburb of Silverlake. It’s here, shacked up in a dilapidated bungalow, that the English artist Ed Fornieles has built his fort of dreams. It’s a world of Twitterbots and confetti-filled Stewie sculptures. Currently Ed is working on a new project, a website called maybenewfriends.com. The site exists in a space between reality TV and social media, where all modes of communication are combined and cross-fed to form a dialogue of Internet jest in which we may identify and find a new e-friend. Responding to the frenetic pleasures of social media, Ed creates a world that, in its indulgence of fantasy, is perhaps the closest thing to reality that we may encounter in contemporary…