AN ARCHITECTURE OF INSTAGRAM
In today’s world, we are positively
bombarded by photography. Digital smart phone cameras have fundamentally
changed the way we communicate with one another. Emoji, GIFs, and selfies are
the new languages put to work explaining and describing all our complex
concepts, feelings, places, and faces with as few written words as possible. Its become evident written language must make room for the new photographic
“words” driving our everyday conversations. It’s tempting to think of these
photographic languages as just another kind of photography; one that has simply
been squeezed onto a text message thread in your hand. But we are born into an
age of photography, and it’s difficult to see these new photographic languages
as anything other than more photos in our lives. We’ve accepted them now as
ordinary as radio or air conditioning. In my field of architecture, the use of
photography and imagery is extremely important during the design process to
visualize projects and their context. Only after the project is complete
however, do smart phone users take their turns capturing and sharing those
designs over the internet. Whether they realize it or not, these users are
constructing a digital presence for built architecture. How are these tools
affecting the way we interact with our built environment? And what does it mean
to design for this new digital photographic medium? An architecture of
Instagram is an exploration into the technologies and principles used to design
physical spaces for the digital. Whether or not Instagram remains one of the
most popular social media apps, only time will tell, but its features
introduced to the world will likely only continue to expand and transform our
built environment, so let’s start getting a better grasp of it.
PHOTOGRAPHY AS A MEDIUM
To get an idea of what an architecture
of Instagram is, we will need to have a grasp of the different uses of
photography media, and how those uses changed the photographic medium over the
years with introductions of new technologies. It’s important though that we
take a moment to tease apart what is meant by a photographic “medium,” since
its meaning has crafted an entire school of thought since the 60’s, and our
understanding of how mediums affect society has been expanded considerably
since the invention of television. Essentially, media are the different
technological inventions, or tools used for mass communication such as
photography, television, print publishing, or radio. Moreover, in the 20th
century, the term “medium” has been employed to describe the active use that
media may be put. For example, telephone companies in 1910 experimented with
uses of the new technology to relay church sermons to those early adopters who
were unable to attend their Sunday service (“Hearing Sermon by Telephone,” 1910). That turned
out to be an ill-fitted use of the telephone, but in the early days of a
technology, it is not always obvious how a technology should be used; sometimes
a bit of market probing and social experimentation is necessary. A technology
inevitably asks of us to use it in a particular way. To speak of
photography as a medium is to say that the use of photography changes
depending on which technologies are creating and/or displaying it. A technology
is the physical instrument used to bring forth the necessary qualities of the
media form; think of an AM/FM radio with volume and station dials, a ball-point
ink pen with college-ruled letter-sized paper, or an Amazon Kindle e-book
reader. A medium is the use that technology is put to. The medium is
represented by the social, political, and myriad cultural ways that Kindle or
pen are put to use; think journalistic research, scrapbooking, advertising, or
simply as a paperweight. Neil Postman, a significant contemporary thinker on
the topic in the 80’s suggested: “A technology is merely a machine. A medium is
the social and intellectual environment a machine creates” (Postman, 1986 p. 84). To
think of photography as a medium, is to consider each of the different forms
(uses) it takes (e.g. advertising, movies, Instagram) as new arenas for society
to communicate and play with.
Photography has taken many forms
through the centuries, since its practical creation in 1826 by French inventor
Louis Daguerre (Daniel, 2004).
Each of those forms has created a new medium for photography to flourish
within. The invention of the photo booth is one such technology that presaged
an alternative use of photography in its day, and arguably incorporated a form
of architecture into the function of photography itself. The photo booth
originally termed the “Photomaton” by its creator, Russian-born American
inventor Anatol Josepho in 1925, was designed to take “instant” photos without
an operator and with little maintenance or upkeep (Goranin, 2008). The term “instant” is relative
here, as the development time for said photos could be as long as eight
minutes, which far surpassed the hours needed by similarly “speedy”
operator-less photo booth competitors of its day (Herschel, 2008). It was no longer necessary for a
photographer to stand with you while posing the few minutes for the camera to
capture your image. The Photomaton did all the work to capture, develop, and
even automatically print the eight photographs for you. Josepho’s Photomaton
was not the first photo booth, indeed there were many that came before it, with
similar but unsuccessful concepts predating Josepho’s invention by 42 years,
but his was the first recognizably modern version we still see today, complete
with a privacy curtain to shelter oneself away from the nosy passers-by (Goranin, 2008). The
proliferation of this seemingly novel but curious attraction unveiled a new use
of photography as a technology. It provided us a new medium of
photography; one inextricably linked with a form of architectural design.
Anatol Josepho with his early Photomaton (1927)
Josepho’s Photomaton and an industry of
competitors’ models flourished across the globe over the course of the 20th
century. The photographic technologies adapted, but the architecture of the
booth changed little in the course of their conquest. The technology has of
course gone digital now, but the booth simply adapted, changing little to
acknowledge the new form of its function. What use is that big box in the
corner of the store to house what essentially can fit in your pocket? What has
planted this gilded age photographic medium so firmly onto the shores of the
digital age?
One example can be found in today’s
increasingly common wedding party customs, where you might expect to find one
of those booth-less green-screen stages you and your friends can pose against.
Here, the photo “booth” is a place to go to express yourself during the course
of the celebration. A kind of documentation of the party; a reminder of who you
were that evening. In this vein, photo booths are designed to take pictures of
people, not objects. They may take pictures of people with objects, like props,
but never for the objects themselves. Thus, here we see the photo booth acting
as a kind of stage or backdrop for actors. It is a kiosk for personal
performance. For this reason, some features of the classic photo booth, like
the privacy curtain, seem archaic in today’s selfie culture; they seem like
vestigial Victorian artifacts of a bygone era. By contrast, the public use of
the smart phone camera, with its deluge of innovative apps, offers a sandbox of
enticing options asking us to explore our narcissism together. Not the least of
these are the plethora of preferences selfie apps offer for our good side. It
would seem then at first glance, photo booths appear to be competing directly
with social media-linked smart phone cameras. While most of what makes a photo
booth fairly popular can be found in one’s pocket, the combination of curtain,
camera, and automatic printed convenience provided a medium of photography that
has outlasted its technological methodology. Why hasn’t the rise of the camera
smart phone over the last decade not yet laid to rest the bulky booth in the
corner of our public spaces?
Surprisingly, photo booths have
sustained a popular existence through their continued use at corporate events,
weddings, birthdays, and small storefronts around the country. In 2019, photo
booths haven’t needed to compete with the selfie liberation afforded by the
smart phone camera, but instead have complimented it and its selfie-engrossed
culture; the more ways of taking a selfie it would seem, the better. The
relentless march of commercialism has merged the photo booth with the flair of
the television sound stage and show business has naturally invaded a market
predisposed to performance framed through the camera lens. The “good selfie,” a
currency valued for it’s status boost on the social media market, is on offer
by both the camera phone and the photo booth. Selfies taken in the
“traditional” sense, it would seem, are no longer defined by the individual’s
taste, but instead are publicly traded commodities whose stocks increase with
each “like.” The name of the game is sharing amongst friends in the
selfie-engrossed culture.
Courtesy of Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-40464
Robert Cornelius - the first "selfie" (1839)
Good group selfies are valued even more
for their shared multiplicity amongst their members. It is here where Josepho’s
humble photomaton still dominates the market over a hundred years later with
its twentieth century conveniences continuing to lure in a twenty-first century
audience. As if smart phones weren’t enough, a photo booth offers the perfect
excuse to take a group picture. The lack of convenient on-demand digital
manipulation, e.g., cropping, deleting, or retaking all within a moment’s
notice invariably increases the value of any given physical group selfie print.
In a society where perfectly curated digital selfies paint the world an all-too
perfect place, the photo booth provides a justified refuge for the permanent,
and the chance to print parity between everyone’s memory of an event, and
everyone’s reality of that event. Under the limitations of the photo booth, no
digital exploitation is allowed, as the evidence is distributed right-away and
sometimes in duplicates. In a group context however, the difference between a
digitally manipulated photo and a raw instant photo should become clear, as the
photo booth tends to provide only the raw.
Individually, photo booths ask of us to
take home a memento of the day. They are not selfie-worthy objects in and of
themselves, but instead charm us to step onstage for a moment in the spotlight;
they are a place to take a selfie, just as a dinner table is for eating, or a
mailbox for the delivery of mail. Photo booths are places of private selfie
prejudice which allow us to afford a healthy diet of collective narcissism. Its
persistent existence in the digital age is testament to its success as a transformative
architectural medium for photography. But photography clearly has influenced
architecture in other ways before and even today has already begun to transform
some of our largest institutions. Places we rely on explaining our most
fundamental questions about the universe are being manipulated by the
photographic medium, and the quest for a better selfie. Let’s take a quick look
at the ways architecture is being transformed by the intersection of social
media and it’s reliance on digital photography.
MUSEUMS IN THE DIGITAL AGE
The function of museums has not changed
much in the last two centuries. They remain places for people to communally
visit and experience art, historical artifacts, and scientific discoveries. But
to truly experience all these things, a museum asks you to be physically
present; to walk its halls as it were. This fact alone should ground museums as
physical institutions deserving of some of our greatest architectural attention
and effort. Indeed, the great museums of the world represent as much. However,
in recent years several collections of the world’s most famous brick-and-mortar
museums have gone digital, providing their treasures in digital facsimile for
the world’s benefit. The various methods being explored by museums via the
ranks of programmers and designers employed to this end are fascinating.
However, their efforts leave us with some unanswered critical questions: Can
one experience the contents of a museum without ever stepping foot into one? Or
to put it another way: Is a physical presence required to truly experience
physical art?
For many, the latter answer would be a
resounding YES! But consider the analogous domain of music, where we have
clearly moved past the physical requirements for such experienced art as can be
heard. Why then are the physically bound visual arts still under fire for their
attempts to be digitized? As is the case with music, some audiophiles argue
that one cannot attain the same fidelity as what can be heard feet away from a
nearby instrument. Their argument implies a loss of fidelity due to
digitization and its limitations over the human ear. It could mean an artist’s
message may only be fully perceptible within earshot of the physical
performance. Depending on how you see it, the relentless march of commercial
progress for sustainable access to music has left this debate in the dust.
Efforts of the past couple centuries to spread music to the ends of the earth
have afforded us an unprecedented level of artistic saturation that previous
generations could only dream of. Consequently, society has by and large agreed
to forge ahead with the “good enough” digital audio diet and sacrifice the
hidden artistic messages found only with the in-person experience. Indeed, many
anticipate music should be made available in this digital way. After
all, it’s provided so much to so many, and at so little cost. Public demand
brewing for digital access to visual art may also be evident, but the method to
make it work is not yet certain. Museum curators know this, and the future for
their visually consumed collections may be on the line. Perhaps the impact of
such a future technology depicting good-enough digital artifacts online will
change the way we consume art. In fact, this may soon be society’s expectation
of exactly how art ought to be made available. If we have begun to accept the
depictions of art found in a Google search as good-enough, then the train has
already left the station, and we may already be on a downward spiral to
digitization or bust.
Considering this bewildering prospect,
museums in the last few years have begun to take a good look at their role in
the digital frontier and have extended access to some of their familiar
collections for digital consumption. Some museums have partnered with Google to
produce content for the Google
Arts & Culture program started in 2011, which provides interactive
high-resolution galleries, articles, and 360 video tours of art and heritage
sites across the globe. Conversely, other museums have produced wholly separate
recreations of their physical galleries, such as the interactive 3D virtual
reality experiences found at the Paris based Universal Museum of Art (UMA, 2019). If some of the
solutions museums have been tinkering with are successful, have we already
witnessed a “good enough” technology arrive for future consumption of visual
media, and the eventual abolishment of brick-and-mortar institutions? If the
museums have a say in this future, probably not.
Digital technologies have revolutionized the way we experience music and visual art. The convenience of the “good-enough” digital experience for music and art is worth the absent in-person experiences. But the domination over human’s ability to compute and process information is where we find the biggest human-centric backlash against digital machine adoption. We humans pride ourselves on our ability to concentrate and think about things. Indeed, it defines us as a species. We practice for much of our lives learning the methods figured out by generations on how to mentally process information accurately and precisely. Relinquishing that mastery to a machine seems paralyzing to us, and seemingly strips away our natural aptitude to think on our feet. Our reluctance to give up those skills to our digital creations enjoins a fear of dumbing down generations’ ability to compete in the world. One familiar argument comes to us from upset parents in the 1970’s who believed the recent introduction of the affordable pocket calculator in the classroom would soon dismantle generations’ abilities to perform basic head-math; this of course didn’t happen. Today, standard calculators and their digital descendants have effectively augmented the human capacity to perform accurate and precise calculations. Multiplication tables and written long-division are still taught of course, but the dizzying rapid development of silicone processors have made clear the limitations of the gray-matter processors in our heads.
The Universal Museum of Art (UMA) - "A Walk Into Street Art" virtual reality exhibit.
Digital technologies have revolutionized the way we experience music and visual art. The convenience of the “good-enough” digital experience for music and art is worth the absent in-person experiences. But the domination over human’s ability to compute and process information is where we find the biggest human-centric backlash against digital machine adoption. We humans pride ourselves on our ability to concentrate and think about things. Indeed, it defines us as a species. We practice for much of our lives learning the methods figured out by generations on how to mentally process information accurately and precisely. Relinquishing that mastery to a machine seems paralyzing to us, and seemingly strips away our natural aptitude to think on our feet. Our reluctance to give up those skills to our digital creations enjoins a fear of dumbing down generations’ ability to compete in the world. One familiar argument comes to us from upset parents in the 1970’s who believed the recent introduction of the affordable pocket calculator in the classroom would soon dismantle generations’ abilities to perform basic head-math; this of course didn’t happen. Today, standard calculators and their digital descendants have effectively augmented the human capacity to perform accurate and precise calculations. Multiplication tables and written long-division are still taught of course, but the dizzying rapid development of silicone processors have made clear the limitations of the gray-matter processors in our heads.
To stay ahead in the world, mastery
comes not just with understanding concepts, but also with the skillful use of
the tools that increase our speed and efficiency when doing the work. We have
only to relinquish that uniquely human bias or pride in our mental capabilities
in order to procure the stronger competencies. A bias towards the physical
arts, may be preventing us from achieving an artistic revolution that could
make all art available everywhere all the time. Will we have a convenient “good
enough” digital facsimile arrive to excuse anyone from ever having to visit the
physical version again? Some would say we have already encountered this
reality, and it likely already exists in your pocket. Again, we’ve only skirted
the issue and the question greets us: What is lost without being physically
present in the halls of the brick-and-mortar? Where do the halls of the virtual
exist and do we have an obligation to make them physically present too?
A SOCIAL MEDIUM
An architecture of Instagram is a kind
of lens for us to view the virtual museum. But before we get too far into the
architecture of Instagram, we must first understand what Instagram does. I
presume most readers making it this far into the post will have some
familiarity with Instagram. Even without first-hand experience with the app, a
reading of the previous sections will have foreshadowed these explanations. In
2019, Instagram purports itself a social media app primarily for mobile use. It
wasn’t long since its inception in 2010 for the founders to realize people were
not using Instagram in the same capacity they used other social media
platforms. By 2013, it was becoming apparent a big portion of people’s usage of
the app was trained towards direct communication versus the typical broadcast
usage had on other platforms. And so the developers introduced such features as
“Instagram Direct” to support and encourage this use over the typical broadcast
model other social media platforms established (Introducing Instagram Direct).
While the app is designed for many
different forms of photographic expression, broadcasting one’s work out into
the world is but one means to communicate with other Instagram users. Instagram
has set itself apart by developing its broadcast model further into an entirely
different form of communication. The app stands apart from other social media
platforms namely for its distinctive promotion of a graphical language for
communication, which encourages a different mode or medium for “speaking”
between users. It appears that each new feature released by the company
fortifies an agenda of photographic instant messaging. Instant messaging
lacking typography could be described as a graphical language in the way
photographs are used primarily as the means of communication on Instagram. This
graphical language encourages a culture devoid of typography where users may be
excused for not providing captions to their photographs or may not be bothered
to explain the photograph at all, where the act of posting itself is enough of
an explanation for others to piece together the intended story.
Not everyone uses Instagram in this way
of course, but the overall design intent pushes for a more impetuous use of
photography at a scale that has never been seen before. Long gone are the days
of the family scrapbook enthusiast; the ephemera of digital photos provides
little need to sort or assign organizational preferences of photo albums. All
photos are instantly searchable, and infinitely cloneable. The effort to take a
picture need not include the effort to organize, specify, and archive albums of
photos, since the app does this for you with ease. This ultimately changes the
use of photography from that of skill, performance, or measured intent to one
of simple gesture and reflex. Reflexive photography has been with us since the
90’s, but it took social media to give purpose and meaning to the mass hoarding
of those photos. Sharing naturally amplifies the need to take more photos, and
with enough exposure, millions now look for more reasons to stack even more
atop their photo pile. Instagram attracts users from all walks of life with
photographs depicting user’s surroundings, their hobbies, their food, the
mundane, the exciting, and everything in between. Uses of Instagram range from
documentation and cataloguing one’s surroundings, to “text” messaging one
another - except of course without the need for words. The app features tools
to assemble short series of photo slide shows empowering users to form visual
interactive stories accompanied with fun captions, interactive polls, or with
nothing at all. Altogether, I willingly join the crowds in calling this new
medium or use of photography simply as “Instagramming” which as we shall see,
has a commanding impact on architecture. It’s not difficult to see where the
march of capitalism picks up the thread here.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF INSTAGRAM
We’ve now arrived at the namesake of
this blog post, where acknowledging the power of Instagram to transform
language itself into new uses of photography leads us to an investigation of
its effects on architecture. The architectural design language Instagram
targets in 2019 is one of colorful, shiny backdrops, sharp angles, larger than
life scale figures, and an abundance of commercial advertising. That last one
of course comes with the territory of social media at large. Museums have
naturally waded into these waters as the institutions best equipped to maximize
a business model utilizing these social media platforms, but it could be said
the effects museums have had on Instagram are minimal. However, the effects
Instagram has had on museums are colossal. You may have noticed in the last few
years the redaction of many museums’ “no photography” policies. Most of that
effort should not be laid at the feet of Instagram specifically, but directed
more to the effects of cheap access and proliferation of smart phone cameras,
which make it near impossible to police illicit photography. Either way, it
became clear to museum curators the use of photography while at the museum fit
this use of Instagram like a glove. “Instagramming” as it’s now become known,
has a home at museums depending on how you use it. One way of Instagramming at
the museum is akin to a scavenger hunt, where the treasures found are those
artifacts with the most interesting subject matter fit to broadcast to your
audience (Hillman, Jungselius,
and Weilenmann, 2013). In this way, the artifacts and art are simply
shiny objects notable only for their appearance against the backdrop of
numerous similarly curious objects. This severe reduction of the use of
museum treasures risks oversimplifying their deeper meanings, and avoids many
educational benefits had from visiting a museum. It should be noted however
that this is only one of many ways to use Instagram, and not all uses are so
reductive.
Users may employ this specific use of
Instagram elsewhere beyond places like museums, but museums are especially
prone to Instagramming. Museum’s tendency to house eclectic assortments of
human-scale objects and display those objects in ways perfectly framed for
taking selfies make them irresistible hotbeds of selfie amusement. First and
foremost, a museum’s purpose is to house novel collections and display them,
but coupled with Instagram’s propensity for collecting enormous amounts of
photographs, that purpose is transformed. The overlap of this particular use
of Instagram at the museum provides a near limitless set of virtual games for
Instagram users to play with one another. When Instagram is brought to the
museum, the traditional museum experience is changed because Instagram modifies
the way one interacts with the museum and its collections. Many Instagram users
will take photographs of themselves in front of the art as a means to share it
with their audience or with their friends. In a lot of cases, it is not simply
a picture of the art itself, but a selfie of the art with the photographer’s
face or body in front of it. The Instagram user may even take multiple pictures
of the piece of art, not to get a better angle of the Egyptian hieroglyphics
mind you, but instead to get better angles of their own face in front of those
hieroglyphics, which now cannot be fully seen. In this way for many who may
never visit, the subject matter itself and the display of the museum’s
collection is curated not by those trained as curators, but by those in pursuit
of the perfect selfie.
Museums are at quite a loss at what to
make of all this new unsolicited but sometimes welcome digital attention.
JeiJei Fei, digital director at the Jewish Museum in New York, in her 2015 TED
talk exclaimed of the incredible numbers of photos increasing their
institution’s online exposure to the masses (Fei, 2015). Is the new exposure worth it? What is
the cost to museums to have their collections splattered across the internet in
filtered, biased, selfie-framed predilections? The lack of conscionable action
by museums in this space may have given rise to some of the new “competitors”
offering a place with content for the perfect selfie. They are often called
“Instagram Museums,” Instagram “pop-up museums,” or “IG Museums.” They range
from converted two-story, small urban storefronts, to large installations of
exhibit rooms at established museums. They provide a kind of playground for the
Instagrammer to explore and work on their craft. In a way, these spaces are
built like stage sets for an unwritten screenplay. These are large and small
rooms connected to one-another, usually in a kind of path akin to Halloween
haunted house tours. But haunted houses make sense without the use of photography;
IG museums do not. In fact, it makes little sense to tour an IG museum if
you’ve left your camera at home. You usually have one hour, so come
ready-dressed for the occasion and be prepared to take a lot of photos. The
spaces tend to be broken into several vignettes or diorama scenes that are
ready-made stage sets for framing your perfect photograph. The vignettes from
wall-to-wall are designed to bleed together seamlessly. This helps to make it
more of an experience moreover than just a service to Instagrammers. Indeed, in
my conversation with founder of the touring IG museum: “The FOMO Factory”, Rachel Youens noted the
intent was to give people a chance to open up to their inner child. She
explained she wanted to give adults a place to freely play and explore
themselves. This is not a novel idea, but the business model relies on the use
of photography to make sense of a market demanding these stage sets be made
available.
But are these Instagram museums simply
stage sets? Some of the most successful IG museums such as the Museum of Ice Cream in New
York and in other cities, tend to center around specific themes which make the
entire experience more cohesive. In this sense however, the themes are used
more as a setting rather than as a scripted narrative connecting the rooms
together à la a haunted house. In the case of the FOMO Factory, the theme was
childhood, and each of the spaces were designed to evoke aspects of American
childhood nostalgia aimed at the target demographic: Namely millennials and
Generation Xer’s. Being a millennial myself, it was amusing to see familiar
toys playfully pinned to the wall in a manner similar to the format of images
found in the “I Spy” series of books popular in the 90’s, and likely familiar
to a millennial audience. Since any given wall found at the FOMO Factory
displayed some amusing nostalgic decoration as a backdrop, it was clear their
purpose was to act as eye-catching backdrops for your Instagram feed. They were
seemingly designed to be useful to the target demographic when shared on
a social media platform, and it felt easy to take a perfect selfie in front of
them. It’s easy to see these spaces as trendy temporary art installations, but
because they’re designed to be photographed as backdrops for people, they
arguably function more as architecture than as houses for art. In this
capacity, IG museums can be fascinating studies of architecture fit for
Instagram consumption.
What is the goal of an IG museum? Is it
an oversimplification to describe them as backdrops for selfies? Do they simply
function as entertaining escapes from reality, like an amusement ride? Surely
entrepreneurs like Rachel want to see these spaces do more by sparking
meaningful conversations and inspiring people to open up, but it’s hard to say
if they’ve achieved this goal yet. At the moment, a successful IG museum is one
that helps visitors take captivating selfies for the internet; an amusement
ride does not, which strikes the chord between a design for photographic
architecture, and a design for entertainment. If IG museums are accomplishing
what they purport to be providing, then we are indeed witnessing a new use
of architecture. Not one of entertainment, but one of trendy photography, even
if it means pinning spray-painted Mr. Potato Heads and Barbie dolls to a wall.
Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting
architects start pinning anything to their walls, or follow trends on
Instagram, though it is enticing to consider. The app is a place where
scrolling down your feed reveals people, places, and objects blending together as
if they were connected somehow. Since these images can whisk past you in
seconds while scrolling, it’s easy to see how trends in one interest, like
embroidery can manifest in other fields, say urban design. Cross-pollination of
design amongst disciplines is nothing new, but the speed and scale we find on
Instagram and other social media platforms is. That scale of design
cross-pollination fundamentally changes the process of design across many
disciplines and industries. IG museum business models have struck a balance
dissimilar to the places their title suggests. They are not at all like museums
in the experiences they provide. In this way, their reliance on this new use of
photography makes them more akin to, you guessed it, photo booths. Photo booths
represent that opportunity at the corner of the street to “play and explore
yourself”, and thusly a successful IG museum must create as many opportunities
for a well-framed, captivating, attention-grabbing backdrop to this end. For
this purpose, it must be understood that IG museums really are only spaces for
backdrops. No one pays to visit an IG museum simply to photograph the spaces
themselves; they visit to capture a well-framed, captivating,
attention-grabbing selfie. In other words, Instagrammers don’t visit an IG
museum, they use one. Consequently, IG museums don’t need to be very
large spaces, because compared to a photo booth, they’re huge!
The FOMO Factory - An Instagram "museum"
An architecture of Instagram should
mimic these tenants of what I would call: “backdrop design” or similarly follow
more established “set design” strategies developed for the stage and Hollywood.
Here the use of backdrops in architectural design demand architects pay
attention to each wall as a potential composition for the framed selfie. The
process for finding the better angle for renderings, is the same process an
Instagrammer is using to find the perfect selfie in a building. An architecture
of Instagram design process involves looking for a good selfie on as many walls
as possible from as many viewpoints as possible. In fact, it is better to think
of walls and other built elements simply as backdrops for a potential selfie.
Colorful, well-composed, eye-catching: These are aspects of the perfect selfie
composition. Designing this way maximizes too many tunable dials for absolutely
every wall in a project. But assessing the vantage points from the perspective
of an Instagrammer wins back some control to the designer estimating how their
building’s virtual presence will appear when digitally framed.
It can be reasonably assumed
architect’s creations will have an online presence regardless of whether or not
the designer posts it themselves. Architecture has no voice online without a
photographer’s incentive to carry that design message, and all too often that
incentive is social media. Similarly, architect’s renderings mean nothing if
they do not communicate the design intent in a single image, so they should let
that image sing the design as loudly as possible. The effects of Instagram
similarly demand a particular language of design communication. To ignore this
effect is for designers to expose their designs to as many bad or misinformed
interpretations as social media can get away with. Designers should not
shrug-off the bad angles the Google Street View captured of their projects any
more than they would be quick to criticize another architect’s bad renderings.
The language of Instagram is crucial to understand, and it exposes the power
digitally savvy designs can have online if done properly. In the flesh,
architecture can have minutes to capture a person’s attention, but on the
screen, there are only milliseconds to capture that of the thumb’s.
FOCUS ON THE SELFIE
The architecture of Instagram really
isn’t a critique on the changing styles Instagram demands, but more to the
process of design and the use of architecture as a backdrop for the selfie.
Thus the medium of photography, which has been augmented by social media apps
like Instagram, performs a kind of surgery on the medium of architecture. IG
museums are a different use of architecture because they’re designed for
Instagram, which itself is a different use of photography. Are there ways to
incorporate that use into other forms of architecture? Is this something we
actually want for our buildings? To name this a distinct process of
architectural design is not to name it novel or new, but perhaps this process
simply outlines what has been around for more than a century. Describing an
architecture of Instagram is essentially describing the part of the design
process when the designer looks for the picture-perfect angle to highlight the
project. This has otherwise been known as the marketing shot, the “magic moment,”
the “Kodak moment,” or the “money shot” on the project used to sell as a
rendering to the client. It’s even now being called the “Instagram moment”
within some circles. An architecture of Instagram speaks to the fact people
need a space to converge and share their photos together, so let the photos
roll. A well-tuned architecture of Instagram will leave selfie enthusiasts
appreciative of having a proud moment to declare: “I was here, and it was
cool.” Are designers obligated to simply give them what they want?
Every selfie is about the person taking
the photo, but by dent of inclusion, the backdrop formed by an architect’s
designs invariably make that selfie what it is: Unique. The thing that makes
all selfies unique is that special combination of user and backdrop that’s
grounded by place - your place. When mass digital photographic manipulation can
come to us with ease, and there are millions of manipulated photos to notice,
there’s a need for photos with genuine places and familiar people to make us feel
connected with one another. The phenomenon of the selfie unites both these
things, where the context of the familiar face you know in front of a place you
don’t can be authenticated in a way that’s hard to dispute. Architecture can be
that authenticator, or more generally, the environment can be that filter, with
your empathy drawn-out from the familiar face standing-in to keep your
attention. The point is: Highly engaging Instagram moments provide
opportunities for people to use buildings in this way, which itself
provides yet another means for architects’ designs to speak their truth to many
more individuals than may ever actually visit. It would seem then, focusing on
the selfie gives designers a way to direct the conversation they are never asked
to be a part of. In some ways, it’s an invasive use of human attention, but in
other ways it’s a new means to experience architecture. It’s true that it may
not be the same kind of experience as provided by physically inhabiting
architecture. Perhaps its not we who need to inhabit architecture any longer,
as architecture now has a means to inhabit us, and no longer requires us to be
physically present for its impact. Focusing on the selfie is successful because
we do not care about tracking each other’s physical presence in the world, let
alone places we’ve never visited; instead we remember these photographed places
because humans will always go out of their way to empathize with those who have
selfied.
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