Moving the mouse cursor over the top of the page will display the menu bar.
Scrape Elegy is a participatory multimedia art installation designed as a critical exploration of our presence on and engagement with social media. The work uses sound, a physical installation in the form of a pink public toilet, and participatory practice through visitors’ Instagram accounts. It joins the postmodern art procession of toilet-based installations and plays on the aesthetics of the banal (Maffesoli 1999) as a critique of society, much like such works as Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016) and Gelitin’s Locus Focus (2004). It calls attention to the ethical issues surrounding data scraping technology by using the very same technology to read visitors’ Instagram captions from their accounts back to themselves. Sound becomes the medium for self-representation, subverting the text- and photo-based platform of Instagram. The work is personal and user-specific, using parasitic platform practices to create a critique of modern internet capitalism and tech oligarchies (Sætra et al. 2021). Scrape Elegy is a comedic mourning poem, a monologue, and a private show for the individual in a commercialized, globalized, corporate, pink Instagram world. Download Accessible PDF
This page contains media that is intended to start playback automatically on opening. This may include sound. Your browser is blocking automated playback. Please click here to start media.
This accessible page is a derivative of https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1742136/2819444 which it is meant to support and not replace.
Audio description when the original page is opened: An ascending arpeggio in B flat major in a generic electronic keyboard tone, reminiscent of a public service announcement.