What You Save: Cultures of Collecting in the Digital Era

My work is grounded in the intersection of art and technology. I began to explore digital media nearly as early as I discovered art and I am acutely aware of how technology and social media informs my daily life. It consumes me just like it does for almost every twenty-something year old, and I let it. Not only has technology become an extension of the self, myself, but it has also become an extension of my art practice. I am fascinated by how the digital world shapes us and thus how it inspires my work, whether consciously or subconsciously.

What You Save is a project that was born out of my lifetime of collecting, from physical objects during my adolescence, to now in the era of digital media. As children, we may have collected items around us such as a box of rocks, insects, stuffed animals, stolen items from a sibling’s room, or crayon drawings on sticky pieces of paper. As our curiosity grows, so do our collections, kept in the closet, soon forgotten but forever representative of a specific time in our life. While the types of objects we collect may change, the desire to leave traces of ourselves behind doesn’t.

The visual content we consume online is similar in many ways to these conceptions of standard collecting, but also largely informed by the digital platforms they are circulated within. After surveying users’ saved content on Instagram, I have compiled found material to digitally distort and recontextualize the visual content in the form of an animation. I hope this project allows you to take a look at your own digital collections and consider their role in not just your own life, but in the greater, expansive online archive of digital objects.