Instagram Jam

Instagram Jam: Concept and Thinking Process

By Paula Rayo This video poem is called “Instagram Jam” because the constraint to my poem was that I used instagram hashtags from other people’s photos on my Instagram newsfeed to create a poem. Instagram is a social media platform where people share their photos. Hashtags are words or phrases that go with the photos (with the ‘#’ symbol placed at the beginning) so that the photos can be organized into categories when you look up a tag. I jammed up a bunch of these hashtags together to come up with this video.

I think that people sometimes put hashtags on their photos without realizing how powerful just the hashtags alone can be. I thought it would be a good idea to present those hashtags from a different point of view to make people understand that these algorithms are basically the language of our generation, of the new technological world.

With these hastags, I was able to express what humans think about and do in the modern age. It is these topics that we barely notice because it’s become such an integral part of our language. Yet it’s so beautiful because it’s so diverse and at the same time relevant to all of us. To represent these hashtags, I used various items that I found around my house and some cut out pictures from magazines/the internet. With this video, I hope that people can look at hashtags with a greater depth.