My “nothing films,” as I came to call them (in an effort to make this all seem intentional), got a lot of views-not exactly viral numbers, but more than anything I had posted for a while. Their performance baffled me, though it really shouldn’t have. It was a document of what happens to a person who is uncomfortable with change, when things change. After all, these were moving images-these were what the algorithm wanted. I decided to edit it into Reel-length clips and post them on Instagram. I also found this footage quite funny for the exact same reason. I was watching myself silently tell myself the work I make doesn’t matter anymore. And when I eventually did manage to, during the edit, I found it difficult to watch. How could I speak about creativity when, to me, creativity just didn’t feel like it used to? I ended up filming myself for just sitting there, thinking of something to say, for a good couple of hours.Īt first, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the footage. I set up a camera in my studio to film myself talking to it, but as soon as I pressed the button to record, I felt like anything I had to say about creativity was meaningless and irrelevant. I’d determined it would be about creativity and the importance of experimentation in my daily practice. I decided to focus on the film I was supposed to make. I also couldn’t help noticing that both Instagram and TikTok were almost exactly the same as the home videos show “You’ve Been Framed!”-the only differences being that the clips were shorter, and most people weren’t getting paid for submitting them. Having never used TikTok before, I decided to download the app and quickly confirmed for myself that, yes, Instagram was now exactly the same as TikTok. The brief was completely open, and I was trying to decide what to make my film about, while walking in the sun, looking at art, and drinking more than I normally would.īy the time I got home, Instagram was unrecognizable-just like TikTok, people explained. I was also working on a commissioned short film for the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity in California. Luckily, I was on holiday when it happened, so I had a bit of time to think about it properly. All the while, I was finishing a drawing of a horse, and wondering how to make it stand out against this tidal wave of video. Over the next few days, Instagram rubbed salt into my wounds, showing me endless Reels of people playing pranks, lip-syncing Jim Carrey bits, riding bikes into lamp posts, and gleefully pestering their pets until they retaliated with violence. But as the number of likes and comments on my posts began to dwindle, a vision of a bleak future without any new work opportunities took form in my mind. I naively thought there was no way Instagram would punish the millions of users who promoted their motionless artwork on its platform, and had done so for years. Something inside of me insisted on soldiering on, despite this new development. I wondered how someone like me, a lone human being who relied quite heavily on Instagram as a tool for self-promotion, would fare against this machine that had the power to relegate my work to irrelevance. I made drawings and collages, and a bit of music sometimes, too. I do not-or did not at that time-make moving images. It turned out Instagram had rolled out a new user interface and implemented a crucial change to its algorithm, prioritizing short-form video content, or Reels, over static imagery in my own feed, and everyone else’s. When I opened Instagram on Monday, July 25, 2022, things looked a bit different, and I turned to Google to find out why. It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that could instill fear in a person-but when it actually happened to me, it certainly did. If you’d told me 20 years ago that a computer would one day decide my work was unfit to be seen simply because it did not move, and that this development would induce my 42-year-old self to panic, I would probably have looked at you as if there was something wrong with you, and pitied your bizarrely limited vision of the future.
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