Project Background

Artwork by Unknown

For the past five years, I have treated Instagram less like a social platform and more like a digital lab where I acted as a researcher, inspired by the way early naturalists embedded themselves in environments instead of theorizing from a distance, like how psychologists once used their own consciousness as data. I did not stand outside the system and critique it, I entered it. We all have.

But the study was not only technical. It was introspective. I tracked what happened in my own nervous system. When envy surfaced, when boredom arose, when inspiration felt real versus being somehow synthetically induced. In that sense, the method had more in common with early experimental psychology than cultural commentary.

Like certain strands of 20th-century performance art that use the mind to expose invisible social realities, I began testing legibility. I leaned into confusion. It was not chaos for its own sake, it was a small stress test. How much ambiguity could the algorithm tolerate? How much could my audience metabolize before disengaging? What does a metric-driven environment really do to the content that matters?

The study has been longitudinal, watching how identity modularizes under metrics, how trends propagate through algorithmic soil, and how culture shifts when a human lifestyle competition is the dominant design principle of an app that is used by nearly everyone. I was studying not only other people’s feeds but my own participation in them. The conditioning was mutual.

Now, the shift into grounded technicolor is not a rebrand. It is phase two. Clarity, at this stage, is deliberate.

Instagram was originally a good concept. It became a sick cognitive habitat and a behavioral machine. My research approach has been simple. Enter the system, disturb it, let it disturb you, observe the exchange, and only then decide how to design within it.