Anna Tokareva

instastatic

One morning, a routine semi-mindless scroll through Instagram. Hungry for more and more photographs: beautiful insta-stars, fashion, sublime urban landscapes, delectable meals — mini-fantasies of moments I too would like to live through, identities I desire to embody, cravings and imagined possibilities. But then, the smorgasbord of photos instead turns to blurred, watercolour-spill like images. In the middle, a circle that usually tentatively pulses, denoting the coming fulfilment of visual desires, paused.

I took 75 screenshots of these small frustrations, glitches in the downloading flow of data frozen into pixel melts of colour blobs. A scroll-stream of visual information turned into unintelligible, abstracted shadows. Their abstraction contradictory, their newly unidentifiable form made them more compelling.

It also underscored the way the mundane barrage of daily imagery is processed, abstracted by their sheer volume. The loading circle / spinning wheel / throbber stilled into a digital ensō. I took these images and made a looping sequence. Its speed ebbs and flows. The accompanying sound is generated via light data bending: I dropped the first image into Audacity, and edited the resulting track.

Exhibited at /’fu:bar/ Glitch Art Festival 2020
Siva Gallery, AKC Medika, Zagreb, HR and online at expo.fubar.space

Stills from single channel viideo with sound, 9min 5sec.