Micro-Project 2 – Crowd-Sourced Art

My team (Shao Jie, Carol and myself) decided to use our Instagram feeds as our mediums. Our concept was to have the act of reliving our ‘dead’ feeds as our art pieces. We wanted to get people to come to a thought that once a post has past its engagement period, and out of the Instagram algorithm, it MAY JUST BE considered ‘dead’, and it can only be brought ‘back to life’ only through interaction with others.

The instructions were simple. We sent out message to our friends getting them to comment anything on any past posts.

Here were the responses on my feed:

Through this, I have made some interesting observations.

  1. One of the biggest takeaways I had was how everyone is different and interprets instructions differently no matter how simple it can be. I have friends who were confused if they are suppose to comment ‘anything’ or in general anything which was something that didn’t occur to me. Also, some only commented once while some commented on almost any available posts, hence, further emphasising my observant.
  2. Upon comparing my experience with my team mates(who has relatively lesser responses), I have came to realise that the number people who respond to the instructions doesn’t not define social interaction. This work involved social interaction because there was a community who had authority/ rights and knowledge on what to do with our feeds and (one or many) did it. Their response to the interaction was what constituted as social interaction.
  3. Our crowd-sourced project is different from one that is created by a single artist because our vision from the beginning has already got to, in a way or another, involve someone else. Our project was reliant on having participants participated in the commenting that make the feed ‘come alive again’. The process of having an open call for responses, which is (often) not necessary for a single artist/creator, sets our project apart.