instagram sycophancy

right now i'm super in love with instagram i know that for all my friends without iphones, they miss out and i miss out. yes, it's a bit annoying, but i'm still totally in love with it.

it's a brilliant sharing kinda thang and i tell you, it's like the early days of twitter where i really did have some some quiet online time with people i would like to know but don't get a chance to.

i like the fact that it's a bit hokey. and that the social side of things still needs to be sorted out. but i feel like it's the next new awesome thing.

and i feel like artists and image makers really should be bullying it more than they should.

what is it?

OK, for those who don't know, it's an iphone app that is an image-based social feed, a bit like twitter. you can take a pic from your phone and apply a stack of filters to it, give it a name, geo-tag it and upload it to the stream. other people see the stream and can 'like' your image if you want.

there's a sense of close-ness about it and it's fantastic for us arty-visual types. it reveals the visual motivations or processes for a person, and being visually motivated myself, i find that element of exchange so satisfying. 

there are a couple of artists on there who i really only know through their instagram, despite technically sharing a studio space with them. 

call to artists

frankly, i would love to see a whole lot more artists on there. not just from a 'functional' point of view of showing new works, but as an artist, i would love to see what, say, miranda july sees on a regular basis, or spiros panigirakis, or olafur eliasson. 

this is such an opportunity for artists to really grab hold of a social network and gain some cohesion or interest or involvement. 

i think it's also perfect for some of the arts organisations, especially the GLAM crew - i follow brooklyn museum on there and it's so sweet, every couple of days, to see an item that is being conserved - i got to see the Rietveld Dollhouse being restored and it was stunning.

if you were an old-fashioned, art-historian hater-type, it could be argued that it trivialises Art (note the capital), but i think a lot of people said the same thing for reading/writing about twitter. but the amount of writers i follow, and literary events i attend because of writers on twitter has grown. i hold books and heavy theory in higher esteem since finding an outlet for my text-based piffle. perhaps the same happens with instagram.

--FIXME--



it's still in the fairly early stages of being, so there are still a few pitfalls that i would like to see resolved:

- being able to organise my feed into lists - like twitter. i have a few peeps i've had to unfollow because they are prolific (which is rad) and clog up my stream (which is not).

- make the switch to multi-platform. i really miss seeing the daily perspective from a few particular people who are part of my twitter crew, but who don't have iphones (and i still manage to love them). it must be a contractual, or financial reason on instagram's part, but i just wish they could open up the doors a little. maybe they need to deal with more server space first.

- find it easier to find people. it's still a 'tunnel' based social thang - i have to find people and go to their 'who they follow' section and then follow a person. it's not quite so easy.

- share pics. this bit is particularly hard. i've taken to leaving a cc @user tag in a comment, which will notify that user that they've been mentioned in a comment, which leads them to that image. it would be much quicker to just be able to do something like RT/re-tweeting.

there's still something cute and secretive about it this way too (which the nerd/hipster in me kinda likes)


and even after all that, i'm still quite excited to see where this little app will head in the near future.
now, artist buddies get on it.

UPDATE: oh look, @topfife has posted something similar. waddyaknow.