social practice

premise: create an instagram that promotes healthy habits and tips for mental health wellness. we encourage our followers to post using our hashtag: #yourwellnessreminder and to respond to our comments.

our social practice was one of the most organized social experiment’s i’ve ever been apart of. overall this was one of my favourite group projects in the class because of the positivity that our instagram had created. our overall idea was to create an instagram page that posted. the pictures below show the analytics of our instagram account, who interacted, followed and viewed. our goal was to get people to see our page over following but once people started following us, people actually started commenting on our posts. we planed ahead of time who would post at what time. we used an app called “over” to create our posts and “Hootsuit” to perfectly time when to post. behind the scenes we had a google doc and a group chat that we used to add ideas. we created #yourwellnessreminder to encourage people to use it but it was the least successful element on this performance. what i think was most successful were the questions we would post on our comment sections and in our stories. we got a lot of good responses to questions we asked (pictures below). at first there were the few people who wouldn’t take the comment section seriously, but other then that people were interaction very well with our set up. since our overall goal for this performance was to speed positivity and healthy living, hearing ways in which our followers responded to us was touching.

we were inspired by the fluxes movement and the tinycarebot on twitter that would post tweets about self care. in the article read in class “what is Fluxus” by Karen Kedmey, Fluxus is described as: “Fluxus’s spirit of rebellion against the commercial art market” (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-fluxus-movement-art-museums-galleries). our performance piece is not sold as conventional art, it isn’t sold as art at all. the whole idea of our performance is to make people believe that we are a genuine instagram blog when in reality, this performance will eventually end. (i know this isn’t an example from class) this assignment reminds me of an instagram user called Timmy thick who would post sexualized photos of himself which resulted in controversy. there were youtube videos made about him and he was basically turned into a meme (went viral). until one day he posted to his instagram that “Timmy thick” was an experiment from Harvard and the test was complete. It is still unclear if that was true. This relates to our performance because it is despised as something it isn’t. An in class example were the small groups performance pieces. There was a specific performance that required you to throw “unthrowable” objects and accept the failure. This reflects our idea of showing analytics of out instagram instead of follower count. right away our group agreed that views mattered more than followers. We only needed followers to see stats. If we had 0 followers, it would look like a failure, but we could see how many people looked at the page and decided not to follow, which is valuable information.