instagram

This presentation aims to reflect on two labels that have been used to define sets of artefacts born out of the same context but evoking different connotations. I refer to the terms “post-internet” and “post-digital”. Both terms allude to a post-stage, a leap that announces a cultural shift, perceived by artists but difficult to pinpoint and demarcate with precision, a prefix that might refer to ‘after’ (chronologically) as well as ‘beyond’ (spatially); often used to highlight that what has been superseded is the novelty and exceptionality of the internet and digital technology. Actually, these terms address the fact that digital media is no longer a form of mediation but it has become our ontology, though this new form of being is of such a diffuse, complex and assembled nature, not even Haraway could have anticipated it.Triggered by impulses of excess and overindulgence, on the one hand, or sustainability and preservation, on the other, post-internet and post-digital art emerge from a networking and tech-savvy sensibility that has altered the relation between artist, audience, and art object.In particular, I am going to focus on the work of artists that use Instagram as an art gallery for exhibiting their work (Almudena Lobera, Johanna Jaskowska, Lucy Hardcastle) or to sabotage the platform from the inside (Amalia Ulman, Joshua Citarella). Bearing a family resemblance to electronic literature, these works also explore the narrative process in the construction of an artist’s identity, the changing territories of human-machine/artist-spectator interactions and digital-analogue materializations. The art objects they produce can be classified as “phygital”, physical/digital constructs that inhabit, in a myriad of different possibilities of mediation and convergence, the physical and the digital spaces.As artists explore the platform’s potential as exhibition space, advertising site, and conversation aisle, their phygital objects reflect the tensions between a nostalgia for an analogue craftsmanship which rebels against machinic perfection and an interrogation of human creativity that propels us into the future through an ever more profound symbiosis with our technological habitus.

(Source: author's own abstract)

We sometimes hear it said that our relationship with time has been altered. In companies and administrations, the adoption of New Management strategies means that employees feel themselves subjected to ever increasing urgency and stress. The “FOMO Syndrome,” the anxiety generated by our fear of missing out on something in a world in which we are exposed to a constant flow of information and access to other people’s narratives (or at least to their stories), is a phenomenon inherently linked to the digital environment. The Covid-19 crisis has no doubt accentuated this tendency, with its injunction to stay increasingly connected (particularly to social media and video conferencing platforms), and to immediately respond to digital notifications and sollicitations on a 24/7 basis.

According to Paul Ricoeur, “narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence”[1] (Ricoeur, 1984). From this perspective, narrative is our principal tool for situating ourselves in time ― and for experiencing time within ourselves. Moreover, the Digital may be characterized as “a tool for the phenomenal deconstruction of temporality” (Bachimont 2010). This is reflected in its two main tendencies: that of real time calculation, conveying the impression of immediacy, and that of universality of access, conveying the impression of availability. The digital, thanks to its availability and its immediacy, thus leads to constant present, without any impression of the passage of time (Bachimont, 2014).

What happens then when the digital and narrative come together, when digital technology and narrative discourse, between which obvious tension exists, are combined? What happens when we exploit the particularities of “programmable media,” to use the term coined by John Cayley (2018), which for Bruno Bachimont are essentially detemporalizing, to tell a story, which we traditionally consider as being structured by an internal temporality and linked to an external temporality? From such a perspective, the term digital narrative would appear almost oxymoronic.

Digital narratives do nevertheless exist and are proliferating in multiple forms and thanks to varied approaches. What kind of temporal experiences are constructed by these new forms of digital narrative, and how are they constructed? Reciprocally, what new narrative forms, or even new concepts of narrative do these new temporal experiences provided by digital technology offer to us? The challenges lie in the manner in which narratives, revisited for and by digital tools and the digital environment can on one hand stand up to the deconstruction of time provoked by the said tools and environment, and on the other hand make us reflect on our relationship with time, and on the place of narrative as a discursive mode in our culture and our ways of interpreting the world.

In this article we will focus on three very different types of digital stories, in order to analyse the diverging potentialities of the relationship between the digital, temporality, and narrative. We will study two artistic creations on the one hand, and the widely used social media feature of stories on the other.

We will first examine a fictional work written for the smartphone[2] (downloadable from an app store), which is based on notifications, i.e. in which a fictional character regularly sends notifications to the user. This type of narrative plays on notions of temporality, with the intrusion of the reader’s real time.

We will also study a narrative based on a real time data flow[3]. The constraints imposed on the narrative by this type of apparatus imply that the causality of events is replaced by the sequentiality of real events. Yet this technical specificity, the linking of the narrative to a real time data flow, can mean that life’s contingencies enter into the narrative and result in a “pure time experience” (Chambefort, 2020).

Finally, with a change of field and direction, we will examine the phenomenon of the stories made possible notably by platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, which allow users to display a short video clip, an animated or static picture, a text or even a mini-survey for a default duration of twenty-four hours, which in turn is temporalized and presented to users with an associated duration of fifteen seconds, after which the feature automatically displays the next story available in the user’s newsfeed.

These three examples each explore the notion of temporality and the use of time in the digital “narrative” from a different angle: first, the interaction between the real time of the reader and his/her reading with narrative time, and so with the fictional work, then that of the diegetic time determined by the data flow, which thus becomes the temporal axis of the work in question, and finally the temporality imposed by the story features on various platforms, presented as a constitutive aspect of the story, and which the content provided by the user adopts and integrates.

[1] “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.” (Ricoeur, 1985).« Le temps devient temps humain dans la mesure où il est articulé de manière narrative ; en retour le récit est significatif dans la mesure où il dessine les traits de l’expérience temporelle. »

[2] Enterre-moi, mon amour (Bury me, my love), The Pixel Hunt and ARTE France, 2017: https://enterremoimonamour.arte.tv/.

[3] Lucette, gare de Clichy, Françoise Chambefort, 2017: http://fchambef.fr/lucette/.

Instapoetry is entangled in the ecology of Instagram and the digital media ecology at large, which despite instapoetry’s very conservative output (images of text or images with textual elements), still has caused questions regarding how to approach it. While a lot of poetry on Instagram is simply images of poetry remediated on the social media, there also exist a type of platform literature, or platform poetry, which in this paper is treated as instapoetry proper.

With instapoetry proper the intent of publishing it on Instagram is something that affects how we should approach it aesthetically. From a media ecological and posthumanist perspective; while we use social media to do things, it also affects how we do things.

In this paper I will present and argue for my proposed definition of instapoetry proper, which is poetry created with the intention of being an Instagram post published in Instagram. This definition is meant to work as a way to combat textual as well as media blindness when approaching an instapoem for the close reading of it. I will show that the creation of instapoetry is closely tied with the creation of Instagram posts and the use of social media in general, which among other things includes the editing and filtering of the everyday to become extraordinary. With instapoetry, this means creating a literary experience of an Instagram post where you approach the poem first by looking at it.

I will show this by close reading different examples of instapoetry from both an established instapoet, the Norwegian instapoet Alexander Fallo, and from someone in the gray area between hobby writer/amateur/Instagram user and established instapoet.

This paper will touch upon how the digital environment, or rather, the digital ecologies of which instapoetry exist in, offer a different type of literary experience when the poem is intended as an instagram. While perhaps not being born digital poetry, it is never the less born into the digital. This is relevant because it shows how the situatedness of the authors and the poetry requires adjusted close readings of this type of poetry, where the poetic work – understood in encompassing more than just the (digitally) printed word depicted in the image – needs to be read as what it is intended to be.

Even if the remediations of instapoetry into printed works might lure us into thinking we can continue with our old ways of close reading poetry. Which in some cases might be too tied to the print ecologies of our contemporary world and thus cause unintended textual and media blindness to new non-avant garde works, such as the pop poetry of instapoetry.

Instagram poetry, a type of digital poetry is, as the name implies, poetry that is produced for distribution through the social media channel Instagram and most usually incorporates creative typography with bite size verses. 

Instagram poetry can demonstrate the cultural impact of a posthuman cyborgian fluidity of borders and forms in that we essentially find ourselves left with anthropophagic texts - cannibalistic texts that remix, reuse and re-appropriate content. Digital texts can no longer be regarded as singular standalone objects rather they are constantly changing assemblages in which inequalities and inefficiencies in their operations drive them towards breakdown, disruption, innovation and change