'NTITLED: When words are enough™

On my private Instagram account, I do all kinds of shit. I’ve realized that the reason I started it is — duh — to get away from main page fatigue, but I also wanted to still share things I’ve collected. At some point the outside world needs to see what’s in your camera roll, even if it’s not the most followers possible.

So I was on there for a couple years just fucking around… feeling safer with less eyes… being just a little more candid and wily in my captions… posting silly photo dumps… following only basketball news accounts & wagyu beef purists. But I eventually hit another crossroads. After being on Instagram for a decade plus, I’ve long been feeling my ability to express myself on the app crumbling. I’d attribute some of that to the natural arc of personal and creative growth, as well as ever-changing social circles, but I also need to be fair to the social media giant’s place in all of it.

On one end, Instagram has grown to be a full-service creative suite with a ton of tools and a robust canvas. A built-in audience, too. Using it 24/7. That sounds like a perfect storm for useful expression.

But on the other end, the service has never quite evolved from being a place to publish an aesthetic, and only that.

Posts, captions, geotags, stories, even the aforementioned creative tools, they’re all there to service the personal mythology. I believe in this pursuit to some degree, everyone needs to show up somehow. Personal mythology as Product™ can be a really powerful asset. But as a place for anything else — like true blogging, or a real-time graphic design outlet, even just a place for fucking around with digital crayons — I began to worry. The only thing that mattered was what I “collected” in my camera roll, and how to speak to it.

And by that point, I felt the irony was lost. On Instagram, the 1000 words “they” promised me I was owed by looking at a photo — any photo — were stifled by the looming comment section, the silent quest for validation, the in-jokes. The self-aware positioning. The rustic-photographer-communityintentions of the old app have long been gone, and I don’t necessarily pine for that anymore. But I guess if I’m going to spend all my time here, I just wish it felt easier to sit around and break things. To complicate one’s own trek toward a marketable mythology.

So I started fucking around on Stories a year ago, and throwing down words to elicit feelings I was having. Loose knick-knack phrases gathered from conversation, from life, from the brain. I would put music behind them, (which, let’s be honest, is the best feature of Instagram by far) and try to tell a tiny story. And they just became title cards for a present emotion. The Saul Bass-ian intro to my deep volume of introspective musings, never to be fully divulged but at least implied. A Feeling In 15 Seconds Or Less™.

Eventually it became like journaling. Do one every other day, sometimes multiple in a day. It evolved to be a full-on audiovisual exercise. Add movement w/ stickers. Change the colors up. Go in without a pre-determined idea for a song, feel it out. At a certain point it added up to a creative process, and I started to feel like being on Instagram wasn’t just me getting slapped upside the head by content all day. I can withstand it… as long as I step in this booth.

I’ve uploaded them for watching on Vimeo here. I’m doing this, in one sense, because I’m proud of my year-long commitment to them. I think they’re so much fun. And they’re so me. But also because I can feel myself being anxious about doing this kind of expression behind a private account for awhile and worrying that it will go unnoticed. Or worrying that Instagram will somehow lose them forever. This has been, after all, my social media sanctuary.

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My relationship with the word ‘publish’ is a weird one. Especially with the whiplash of so many different online mediums, all with their own dialects. I don’t know at what point anything I do is publishable anymore. I only seem to know when I’m exhausted thinking about something.

Even now, trying to publish “already published” social media stories to a writing platform as a complete thought is a multi-level brain teaser of a thing. All I know is that my capacity for expression these days feels more limber, like it just did yoga.

So the crossroads I find myself at now is what part of my daily expression to be private about or, if not, where to put it. It’s an ongoing experiment, one that has spanned most of my life. More to come on my findings there. At least for now: I am still on that damn app every single day, scrolling. But I have some hope that in the 15 seconds they allow me, I can make some sense out of whatever’s with me at the moment. It’s been exactly one year since I started these audiovisual transmissions, and in some way they saved my life. I can organize my messy, private and personal thoughts right up against the grand onslaught of visual information, and not feel swept away.

— bgs

there goes that irony again…

hiding in plain sight.™