I invited friends to upload stories and posts to my account as if it was their own – the aim of this was to undermine the reality of instagram.

Initial Experiment

I began with people who I knew were in different cities/countries: my sister in New York, a friend in Talinn and a friend in Denver. The hope was that these uploaded images would either convince friends and followers that I was somewhere else or confuse those who thought I was in Edinburgh – subverting the often self-documenting function of Instagram.

The aim was to disturb follower-audience assumptions that images uploaded to my account are uploaded by me and that they represent my thoughts and experiences.

Was initially unsure if I should post during the take-over, but soon resolved that I should. I had described this project to quite a few followers so was worried they would assume none of these posts were mine – including my own posts would reintroduce uncertainty of origin/authorship which is important to disturbing sense of reality.

As they began to post I began to curate, realising what might work and what might not. For example, photographs uploaded with location tags might look like old holiday photos and so less immediate, while a video or live stream would be more immediate – more immediate appearing more real.

Though the intention was to let people use it freely, I ended up directing their use of it in these initial experiments.

Issues:

Sharing my details – If I was going to share my instagram password with lots of people I thought it might be safer to change it before the project and after, although not massively worried about people hacking me.

Giving people access to my followers via direct message – I trust (trusted) that my own friends wouldn’t send abusive/offensive messages to those in my follower list but if I were to open the project up to strangers this might pose more of a risk – mainly for the fact that anonymity can encourage abusive behaviour (trolls), whether as a joke or not. – This actually happened between people who didn’t know each other but was intended as a joke and easily resolved. Would need to acknowledge this as a risk if I were to open up the project to strangers. – Is giving away my account details an indirect violation of other accounts’ privacy? There’s a slight feeling of unease but instagram is already very public.

Reflections:

It was expressed by a few of the first participants that the anonymity of it was exciting, or at least interesting for them. This wasn’t something I had thought about going in but definitely something I wanted to consider going forward. The anonymity actually works two ways if people are aware of the project – my own posts as the “real” calum_artin become lost in the takeover.

Extended Experiment

After the initial experiments I messaged more friends and classmates inviting them to start using my account.

Here’s the link to my instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calum_artin/ Please look through the highlights reel titled stream17 for evidence of this project in its original format. It’s important to mention that this folded in with another experiment, which was to overload my story with photos and videos.

I received responses quickly and made sure to screenshot every post (before realising they were automatically archived – handy). I began to doubt how interesting the results were; is this just a chaotic, annoying mess of images and videos?

Key words for reflection:

ANONYMITY – Increased

AUTHORSHIP – Blurred/Anonymised/Multiplied

AMBIGUITY – Increased

REALITY – Multiplied/unified/distorted

CHAOTIC

Questions to develop the artwork: Is it important that my audience are aware of the project, or is it important they don’t know? Does this artwork end on social media or does it end in a gallery? As document, video, photo or interactive? Do I want feedback from participants? Are people already well aware that instagram doesn’t reflect reality?

Answering people’s responses – I wasn’t sure how to respond to messages – do I explain the project? (I did this more often than not, probably because it was less awkward) do I keep pretending? (might have led to more interesting developments and would keep the reality disturbed, as intended) do I just ignore them? (may have been best option but might eventually have had to respond to some people)

If I were to take this project further than I have I would need to devise a plan or maybe a script for responses.