Social Media: The Basis for Exploration

The many interpretations of social media and its role differ: it is a place designed primarily for the sharing of one’s own identity in exchange for likes (Bibhu et al. 2021), a quick fix of instant entertainment (Volcic and Andrejevic 2022), and a place where the user bears witness to the content creation of others (Schmuck et al. 2019). Other scholars, when speaking about social media, see it as a platform where more democratic relationships can be enacted, being a place for the creation and ‘existence of multiply constructed selves’ (Akmam and Huq 2016: 232). Part of the ‘construction of self’ has also allowed for more important relationships, communities, and actions to play out on social media. Platforms such as Twitter (now X) and Facebook have been credited as integral communication and engagement mechanisms for organizing social movements such as Occupy, Slutwalk, and Uncut (Hill 2013). More recent research has found influencers on TikTok and Instagram to be powerful voices in social movements; Goodwin et al. (2023) have described these influencers as ‘Political Relational Influencers’. Other work has found that social media provides an important avenue for vulnerable LGBTQI youth to find support and networks within their communities (Hiller et al. 2012).

In the art world, Instagram has changed the way in which we consume art and even the type of art that is curated and presented (Pardes 2017). Whereas most museums used to prohibit photography, many of them now plan for Insta-friendly installations and displays, giving rise to the new term ‘Instagrammable Art’ (Budge and Suess 2018). Many of us experience more art through our social media feeds than we do first-hand, mediated through someone else’s experience and lens. However, as Mihaela Mihalova (2021) notes in their work ‘To Dally with Dalí: Deepfake (Inter)faces in the Art Museum’, an increasing number of galleries and museums are using new technologies such as deepfakes to create this Instagrammable art as an experience within the museums themselves.

Instagram was developed as a photo and editing ‘app’ in 2010 and now hosts more than a billion users (Diefenbach and Anders 2022; Rejeb et al. 2022). In 2012, Instagram was bought by Facebook (now Meta) for approximately $1 billion, but it remained an independent brand following the acquisition (Kumar 2019). In his chapter ‘Wealth Creation in the World’s Largest Mergers and Acquisitions’, Kumar (2019) credits Instagram as being ahead of the curve in terms of its use of a mobile application rather than a web-based platform. He writes that ‘Instagram is a community for sharing visual stories through photos, videos, and direct messages’ (2019: 321).

Instagram in Scrape Elegy


Social media was central to the creation of Scrape Elegy — through the research, the exploration, and the creation, and in the final work. Our own Instagram accounts were served up for experimentation and dissection. Each Instagram account was scraped and synthesized, then rescraped and played to various collaborators, while we continued to use our personal accounts for everyday use. During the work, as each member of the team added to their Instagram account, the audio journey would update itself, selecting new posts as part of the journey, thereby giving the team a new understanding of the experience that was being created.

 

While Instagram was chosen owing to its user base among the target audience of the Science Gallery (16 to 25-year-olds), we were cognizant that not all visitors would have an Instagram account, so decided to create a dummy audio journey for those visitors who might not be able to access the work otherwise. This dummy account also serves as a backup should the servers go down or Instagram remove our accounts for suspicious, unhuman-like activity. In creating this dummy account, we took to our own accounts and shared a story with a question box, asking our Instagram followers to share their most ‘cringe internet speak’ language.[1] From these terms, we created a dummy Instagram account, serving up the generic content that many would find reflected in their own accounts.

Screen grab from Instagram



How do you see your current self online?

How do you see your past self online?

What does the internet hold in your digital graveyard?

Screen grab from Instagram

In creating Scrape Elegy, we spent much time considering what people wrote and shared via their posts and the selves they constructed over the course of their (Instagram) lifetime — how they created and curated their personal swarm. We looked to works such as Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections (Kerr 2017), a six-month Instagram performance of self-discovery exposing the gap between online self-representation and reality. By asking our audience to review their own social media posts through another voice, we hoped to similarly unveil the fractures between these multiple constructed selves.

While acknowledging the importance of social media, and the role it can play in our lives, once we began to experience our own Instagram captions, it was not the meaningful interactions with our communities that became the most apparent — rather, it was the lack of depth the captions held when stripped bare of their surrounding importance. The research team felt that while the intention was important, the outcome felt hollow, creating among the team a sense that what makes us who we are, and how we belong to our communities, is so much more than what we post on Instagram. The caption accompanying a picture of a beloved relative or friend, for instance, does not capture the multitudes of feelings we may have about them — it does not display our fears, nor the lengths and depths of these relationships. This led us to exploring the idea of the banal.

Social media’s role in shaping the ‘new aesthetics of the banal’ became of central importance to our enquiry, with its ‘transcoding of evil and grey media that become sensible to us as banal effects of the everyday; effects that may even possess some kind of inner beauty’ (Anderson 2015: 276). In this view, the algorithmic revolution, rather than being heralded with sound and fury, has occurred without anybody noticing, precisely because of its ordinariness. Millions of pet videos and dinner photos attest to the permeation and creation of the banal through users’ free production, obscuring the hidden agendas of big tech in monitoring our consumption and behaviour. Banality becomes a Trojan horse, beguiling us into accepting and even welcoming the intrusion of large, profit-making corporations into our lives, relationships, and innermost thoughts. The role of the artist, then, becomes one of rupturing the process of banalization and exposing its processes. By presenting the banal as an artwork that can be digitally scraped, archived, and reflected upon, we begin to question the automatic ways in which we post.

The use of the banal to reframe the ways in which we view social media has been explored in works such as Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM (Kerr 2017), where the artist gazes blankly into a webcam that is then uploaded on YouTube, while clipart flickers across the screen. The work is notable for its use of the comments section, which is updated with more and more keywords to attract viewers searching for erotic or offensive content. Scrape Elegy extends this self-objectification from the artist to the participant, making them both the subject and object of their own banality.

🙈 The Technical: Finding Your Footprint

🏠 Home

OTHER CHAPTERS

💖 The Elegy: Creating_the Lament

⚰️ The Toilet: Constructing the Physical

🧟‍♀️ Subverting Big Tech

🎶 Curtain Call: Delegated Performance

🪆 References

@Scrape_Elegy:
👼🏻 Introduction to the Work

💕 Methods and Methodology

💔 Social Media: The Basis for Exploration