Failure to load (2023)
Increasingly urban spaces are designed to be Instagrammable — stylized in a way to facilitate capture through video and still image, then shared on social media with hashtags in order to go viral, in turn driving more visitors to the site (online and away from keyboard). The stylization of such spaces to translate most effectively through lens-based media imbues a new means of experience that is tied to its capacity for digital capture and sharing online as a synthetic city. The art work Failure to Load is an intervention into such Instagrammable places. If these places are designed to be captured, tagged, and shared online, cultivating a digital presence through digital objects (Hui 2016) that can be tracked, stored and sorted through algorithmic mediation, then Failure to Load presents a glitching of such sites. In this project, I visit various Irish urban spaces designed to be Instagrammable, but intervene in such processes through the development of image based works that counter intended engagement. Drawing from the visual language and styles of social media image production, I am producing images and generative animations that are abstracted, obfuscating these locations. The purpose of this project is to defamiliarise the optimisation of urban spaces for social media capture as an intervention of experience.
https://elputnam.github.io/FlyHigher/
https://elputnam.github.io/WhatLiftsYou/
https://elputnam.github.io/LoveRain/
https://elputnam.github.io/SeenRain/
https://elputnam.github.io/MirrorMirror/
https://elputnam.github.io/HeyGorgeous/
https://elputnam.github.io/BountifulBloom/
