My intention with #sthgotherthanaselfie was to tweak how I use Instagram to make it a more meaningful platform for sharing. This idea emerged in response to the overabundance of selfies and ‘beautiful life’ pictures on Instagram. I am also reacting to the proliferation of North American content—of course dependent on who you follow.
Somehow on my online browsing, I stumbled over the idea of re-circulating news headlines that offered a strategy or positive action that others have taken to deal with an issue. Topic-wise, I focused on violence against women and gender relations in countries other than North America. Even if the headlines are old news, I feel it is worth re-circulating them because with all the noise out there, online, things get lost.
The text is the content. During post-production a lot of thought went into trickster strategy. I purposely created visually appealing images to entice viewers to read the message. I’ve also intentionally broken up the headlines so as to slow down the viewer, to keep her/him on the image a bit longer than normally expected. By playing with text size and colour, I’m trying to work against conventional reading and to suggest alternate readings and messages.
I incorporated a circles/target image found online–this signifies to me someone being targeted or targeting a message.
I was interested to see if I’d get ‘likes’ and comments on this series, which I did but I was hoping for more reaction. I used hashtags to draw new eyes to the work.
Medium & Process: This project consists of 9 images posted to Instagram during a 7-day period (March 9-15, 2015). I used artwork from my art journals, worked in Photoshop to add text and effects and used one digital image found onlline; then I shared the image on Instagram which also delivered it to my Facebook and Twitter streams.
You can see the images on Instagram, the intended platform, by going here: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/sthgotherthanaselfie/
