PlaydateMouthfulLenskart

Down the rabbit hole

Visual Essay | Graphic Research

Year
2023
Duration
2 weeks
"that is so aesthetic"
Down the rabbit hole draws upon the concept of utopia created through social media personas. A visual essayistic exploration into the fictionalised realms created to escape the dreariness of real life or maybe the information-dense, chaotic and overstimulating world (Tank Magazine 2021). To be precise, building a reflection of an ‘aesthetic’ lifestyle on social media platforms like instagram that is curated and aligned to popularly shared, distinctive visual subcultures that ultimately form a perception of the self.
Constructing the narrative of this visual essay began with deconstructing existing influencer profiles on Instagram. An attempt at building a visual library - I considered some parameters to control my research. The process involved collecting personal information like age, gender, occupation and then other factors about their profile like number of followers, content type, recurrent visual motifs.
I used the following parameters to filter the collected data:
Age: 18 - 30
Following: Micro influencers (10k - 100k)
Content type: Lifestyle and aesthetics 
Niched hashtags
After reading an article on Dazed about the artist book, The Age of Earthquakes which puts forward a conversation between the authors, I came across the interesting concept - that even today the most relevant typologies that exist are the self-portraits (selfies) and the still life (taking picture of food and curated spaces). Both typologies can be attributed to the concept of vanitas, an artwork that through symbolism reminds the viewer of the vanity, futility and mortality of life.
Inspired by this thought, I worked towards creating a fictional Instagram influencer persona based on typologising the collected visual data.