#public #instagram #captions
Produced for Trevor Laurence Jockims at NYU Gallatin.

This project set out to explore Instagram not as an image-based archive, but as a textual one. I collected captions tagged with nine philosophical themes—love, hate, death, justice, god, beauty, evil, fear, and truth—gathering the “most recent” global posts uploaded in real time between 4–5pm on December 4th, 2018. Each caption was transcribed verbatim, with grammatical slips preserved as artifacts of digital expression, and paired with its image and hashtag count. The result was a reframing of social media abundance: captions that were at times commercial and banal, at times eccentric and witty, and at times eerily intimate. Together, they form a glimpse into how users, often unintentionally, grapple with the oldest philosophical questions in the fleeting space of the feed.