Name: Amanda Thai s3656343
I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration – https://www.rmit.edu.au/students/support-and-facilities/student-support/equitable-learning-services
Media Making Blog Posts
Week 9 Photo (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/09/18/week-9-photo-exit/)
Week 9 Video (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/09/18/week-9-video-now-arriving-at-narre-warren/)
Week 10 Photo (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/09/25/week-10-photo-lonely/)
Week 10 Video (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/09/25/week-10-video-the-door-that-makes-me-late-for-class/)
Week 11 Photo (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/10/02/week-11-photo-hidden/)
Week 11 Video (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/10/09/week-11-video-level-1/)
Title of Report: Post Pumpkin Gnocchi
Word Count: 1462
Post Pumpkin Gnocchi
I am at dinner at Eating House in Rowville with my high school friends. My pasta arrives, pumpkin gnocchi in one of those large black dishes somewhere between a plate and a bowl. It’s February 2018 and my friends have been encouraging me to get Instagram for years.
My friends peer over my shoulder as I edit the photo, enhancing the orange colour of the pumpkin.
‘Oh, wow,’ they say, ‘that really brings out the pumpkin.’
They give me the hashtag: #poppinpumpkin.
I first used Instagram in 2012 and I thought it was a photo-editing app.
Now I realise 2018 Instagram is a totally different world.
~
Vintage
It’s Christmas 2014 and my eldest cousin, Kat, hands me a Polaroid camera so I can take a photo of her in front the Christmas tree.
‘Stand closer than you think you need to,’ Kat instructs.
It’s Week 9, Semester 2, and I’m using Instagram for the first time since the pumpkin gnocchi and I realise I can’t zoom in. I’m pinching the screen—as smartphones have taught me to—but the image isn’t enlarging.
So there I am, in an empty media classroom, leaning over desk chairs and Macs trying to take an Instagram photo of a door.
I look for a zoom ring on the Polaroid camera. There is none.
The square format and vignettes were constraints of the Polaroid, limitations that the technology was striving to overcome. In 2018, we have this technology. I’m taking, viewing and distributing these photos and videos from the same device on which I call people.
While we have this impromptu photoshoot, my older uncles and aunties discuss how impractical the Polaroid camera is, how we all have phones, why don’t we use them?
Yet these constraints transcended and became ‘conventions…literally hard wired in camera designs’ (Manovich 2016, p.54). Instead of sports mode and portrait mode, Instagram has simply—vintage. Even in the digital age, we mimic physical qualities of a technology long obsolete , all the while we distribute these “vintage” photos across the globe in milliseconds.
My younger cousin, Paris, wants a photo with me. After I see the Polaroid in her hand, with its natural vignette and classic white border, I ask to take another one for me.
When I edit photos on my phone, I always, without fail, add a vignette or a lens blur—both potential flaws or limitations in the early days of photography.
To this photo of a door, I intentionally blur two-thirds of the photo.
That Polaroid photo is still stuck to a magnet board on my bedroom wall.
We idealise a past we were never part of. It translates not only to the features of our favourite software, but our idea of what makes a perfect image.
~
Tactile
I’m down in Cape Paterson with my friends, Sam and Meg. Sam got a Polaroid camera for Christmas and we are walking back from the beach, instant photos pinched between our sandy fingers.
We pass them around. There is only one copy of every photo.
I’m writing my Week 10 blog post. My phone is open to my student Instagram account, this week’s photo on screen. In a browser tab, that same photo is open, just larger.
There are potentially infinite copies of my photo.
I’m at Stacks Pancake Bar in Karingal and Sam is back home from the Cook Islands.
She passes me her iPhone—‘a miniature photo album…passed around the dinner table with friends’ (Palmer 2014, p.248).
I’m on the train home from uni and I’ve just posted my Week 10 photo. Seconds after I uploaded it, my phone buzzes with a like from an old dancing friend.
I passed my photo to her phone. She, and anyone else on my Instagram from their phone, holds a copy.
Physical distribution—more instant than an instant camera, but just as tactile.
~
Artificial Spontaneous
I’m with Sam at the 2017 Melbourne Show and we just bought a massive fairy floss flower.
‘Let’s take photos of us eating it!’ she says.
It’s Week 12, I’m late to posting my Week 11 video, and I’m standing at the back entrance of Building 9, waiting for the elevator. My finger is poised above the record button on the Instagram app.
‘Don’t look at me, look at the fairy floss,’ she says, ‘just eat normally.’
Inside the elevator, I aim my iPhone camera at the open doors and lean over to press the ‘close doors’ button, careful not to disrupt my camera angle.
I press down and film the doors closing.
Instagram photography and videography is kind of like ballet. Like ballet, Instagram demands effortlessness. It craves spontaneity and the slice of life yet it must be beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, polished.
I press the ‘open doors’ button and the record button simultaneously. Then I stand there, alone in an unmoving elevator, trying to get the video posted.
Someone calls the elevator up to the fourth floor. I’m stuck here.
A teacher enters and looks mildly confused why I didn’t exit the elevator.
I stand there awkwardly and exit with him on the ground floor.
How do you achieve this paradox without preparation or planning? Like ballet, Instagram’s effortlessness is often the product of choreography and practice.
I would love to say that I truly embraced the spontaneity afforded by Instagram, whipping out my phone to video any doors I passed.
In reality, there was a lot of me seeing a door, seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘perfect moment’, struggling to get my phone out of my bag, waiting impatiently for the app to load and, finally, watching that ‘perfect moment’ disappear before my still-loading Instagram app.
I’ve done ballet for thirteen years. Maybe it’ll be another twelve years before I master the artificial spontaneity.
But by that point, Instagram will be something totally different.
~
Identifying
‘I’ll post it to my second account,’ Meg says as I show a photo of her attempting the splits.
Instagram affords cross-posting to other platforms with just a flick of a switch. Yet as I linked up my Facebook and Twitter accounts, I realised a fatal flaw in this cross-platform distribution.
I flick to a posed photo taken at the beach.
‘Ooh,’ she says, ‘I’ll put that on my main account.’
My identities:
Instagram—a disembodied project on doors. Facebook—me at school formals and friend catch-ups. Twitter—a book reviewer.
I now I understand why many of my friends have a second account.
The network is centralised (https://www.mediafactory.org.au/amanda-thai/2018/07/24/week-2-design-as-a-disease/). We spend all of our time there and hence, we—or our online personas (what’s the difference?)—become centralised too. You make a new online identity and you are making a new account on every single platform.
~
Thematic
Praise on my writing from workshopping sessions:
‘Your piece has a really strong sense of image.’
It’s Week 10 and I’m archiving several impromptu Instagram posts from Week 9 because they didn’t match my theme.
Goodbye, photo of pink dance studio door with clock and glowing exit sign. Goodbye, photo of brown wooden door with passive aggressive sign.
It feels wasteful and restrictive. It feels sly.
‘The sense of colour is so vivid in your piece.’
It’s Week 10 and we’re in class looking at the Instagram account @basebodybabes. I could scroll through their page forever, watching the colours shift.
I now realise how much work is required to achieve that engagement. It’s not in the hashtags or the captions or the bio. The words don’t matter—it’s all about the visual.
‘I love the image of these coloured doors/the rain/your five-year-old self.’
I am a writer with a strong sense of image, colour and metaphor. When I write creative nonfiction, I will often manipulate the framing of a piece to better suit an emotional or visual progression. I don’t feel sly reframing the truth in writing, in authoring a cohesive piece.
Perhaps Instagrammers are writers too.
~
With Instagram and its affordances, photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in a way that is at times paradoxical and unique to the network-centric era in which we live in.
Instagram photos and videos are vintage in appearance, with conventions that harken back to instant cameras’ constraints. Thanks to smartphones, they are tactile like Polaroids, yet can be infinitely duplicated. They encourage an effortless spontaneity only achievable through artifice and planning. It demands theme and consistency, not just from the content produced, but the person behind it.
I’m getting dressed up to go play Dungeons & Dragons. I bought a new orange lipstick.
Maybe I’ll author a photo for Instagram, enhance the orange on my lips.
I can publish it with the hashtag: #poppinpumpkinlipstick.
Seconds later—when Instagram distributes this photo to my friends—I’m sure they’ll be proud.
_______________________
References
Manovich, L 2016, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego.
Palmer, D 2014, “Mobile Media Photography”, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, pp.245-255.