WHAT YOU SAVE
What You Save is a semester-long thesis project born out of a lifetime of collecting, from physical objects during my adolescence, to now in the era of digital media. As children, we may have collected items around us such as a box of rocks, insects, stuffed animals, stolen items from a sibling’s room, or crayon drawings on sticky pieces of paper. As our curiosity grows, so do our collections, kept in the closet, soon forgotten but forever representative of a specific time in our life. While the types of objects we collect may change, the desire to leave traces of ourselves behind doesn’t.
The visual content we consume online is similar in many ways to these conceptions of standard collecting, but also largely informed by the digital platforms they are circulated within. After surveying users’ saved content on Instagram, I compiled the found material to digitally distort and recontextualize visual content in the form of an animation. I hope this project allows you to take a look at your own digital collections and consider their role in shaping not just your own identity, but the greater online archive of digital objects.
Scripps College, Claremont, California
role: research + ideation, social media, animation, and exhibition marketing + graphic design
tools & software: Instagram, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator
timeline: Fall 2020, May 2021
project advisors: T. Kim Tran-Trang, Kasper Kovitz
Instagram Account
Through an Instagram account, @whatyousave, I asked users to direct message any and all content they had saved on social media. As I received these posts, I reposted the content to the account. Each post is unaltered from its original source, except for the caption which simply states the type of platform and the user that it was posted from.
Through my encouragement of “any and all” content and the posting frequency, I sought to limit the presence of curation; however, I quickly realized that curation was inevitable. In asking for content that others have saved, I also asked them to go through their self-selected collections and, again, curate a series of posts to send to me, whether I wanted it to be consciously selected or not. By design, visual social media platforms like Instagram encourage users to consume, collect, and curate, and this curation is hard to avoid even in the case of my archival account. Through re-filtering content back into the platform itself I created a meta version of collecting wherein I continued the process of curating digital images of passion that were saved by users on social media.
The Animation
It was through surveying and categorizing content from the What You Save account that I was able to acquire the found visual material used in my animation. The piece utilizes elements of pastiche to create a new digital identity and emphasizes the reproduction of images on social media through its manipulated content and collaged style. In taking apart and putting together pieces of images almost like a puzzle, I demonstrate how these individually saved digital objects are a synecdoche, or part of a larger whole that is the collective circulation of images on Instagram.
Our tendency to save, organize, and consume objects and images around us has existed for a long time and will continue to exist, taking new forms, but continuing to be representative of ourselves and our participation in cultures of collecting.
Disclaimer: The images as well as the music and voiceover used in this animation are not my own. They come from a variety of sources and users who have posted them publicly to Instagram. I intentionally animate them as part of a creative project. I do not intend to sell or profit from these images nor the video they are included in.
Abstract Media: May 2021 Los Angeles Exhibition
In the Spring of 2021, Scripps senior art and media studies majors worked with their faculty advisors to produce a final exhibition of their capstone works titled Abstract Media. In partnership with LA-based Womxn in Windows, student works were displayed in the windows of multiple storefronts along Chinatown’s historic Chung King Road in Los Angeles. In addition to my own participation and contribution to the exhibition, I also worked with the Scripps art department to create the visual identity and promotional materials for the exhibition.
The exhibition was viewable 24/7 from May 8th to May 15th, 2021.
Main exhibition poster
Postcard invitations
Poster color variations
Exhibition and label close-up
