Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era

By Lachlan MacDowall

Launched in 2010 as a modest mobile photo-sharing application for Apple’s iPhone that uploads images in a square format and add filters that mimic vintage photographs, Instagram has grown to become one of the most-used social media platforms, alongside Facebook and Twitter. This book examines the rise of Instagram and its impact on visual culture by considering how it has shaped two inter-related and highly popular global forms: graffiti and street art. The book traces the intuitive connections between graffiti, street art and Instagram, beginning with the simple observation that when turned on its side, the scrolling feed of Instagram images displayed on a mobile phone resembles graffiti viewed from the windows of a moving train. It argues that with Instagram’s privileging of flows of images tied to mobile devices and the real-time battles for impact and attention that this generates, is more closely synced with the aesthetics of graffiti and street art and the needs of its producers and consumers than any other digital platforms. It analyses the architecture, data, networks and audiences of Instagram, showing how they underpin a dramatic shift in how graffiti and street art are produced and consumed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789380392

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The Instagram Era

Looking at graffiti from a moving train takes practice. Depending on the proximity of nearby buildings and the speed of the carriage, passing walls are often just a blur. Eventually, your eyes adjust. As the train flits under bridges and through culverts, the eyeballs jitter from side to side, as if under the influence of a powerful drug, trying to freeze and focus an image. Graffiti murals painted along the train lines (known as ‘pieces’) or graffiti on the surface of the train itself (known as ‘panels’) are designed to attract attention, though each is different. Some pieces work best in an instant, conjuring a flash of recognition, while the letters of more complex ‘wild-style’ pieces are camouflaged, designed to repel your gaze.

This book traces the connections between graffiti, street art and the digital platform Instagram, beginning with the simple, intuitive observation that when turned on its side, the scrolling feed of Instagram images displayed on a mobile phone resemble graffiti viewed from the windows of a moving train (Figures 1 and 2). Both the experience of riding a metro system and of using Instagram on a mobile phone train the human apparatus to see in new ways, while also shaping forms of aesthetic and political expression.

Launched in 2010 as a modest mobile photo-sharing application for Apple’s iPhone that displayed images in a square format with filters that mimicked vintage photographs, Instagram has grown to become one of the world’s most-used social media platforms, alongside Facebook and Twitter. The reasons for this rise are complex, but include both ‘technical’ reasons, such as its ease of use on mobile devices and the limitations of other platforms in processing images efficiently and ‘aesthetic’ reasons: for example, a widespread preference for the clean, professional look of the filters and display, for the speed of viewing images instead of lengthy text or the availability of celebrity content. Eight years after its launch, Instagram has more than a billion users who have uploaded more than 40 billion images (Instagram website 2018). Through its ubiquity, Instagram has become not just a popular digital application but also a new cultural logic of the visual.

This book examines the rise of Instagram and its impact on visual culture by considering how it has shaped two inter-related and highly popular global forms: graffiti and street art. On Instagram, graffiti and street art are a common sight. The Instagram accounts of the world’s most famous street artists such as Banksy, JR, OSGEMEOS, Shepard Fairey and KAWS all exceed one million followers. I argue that Instagram’s privileging of flows of images tied to mobile devices and the real-time battles for impact and attention that this generates is more closely synced with the aesthetics of graffiti and street art and the needs of its producers and consumers than any other digital platform.

A side-on photograph of the exterior of a Melbourne train carriage, showing a sequence of four square black windows.

Fig. 1 A Melbourne train carriage, with windows resembling the square format of the early Instagram feed, complete with white borders and curved corners. Photo: Lachlan MacDowall.

A black and white photograph showing a view from inside a Melbourne train carriage. The interior is dark, with one seated passenger visible. Through a set of windows, passing graffiti murals are visible.

Fig. 2 From inside, the train windows resemble a scrolling Instagram feed of graffiti. Photo: Lachlan MacDowall.

Contemporary graffiti and street art retain both the material messiness and ideological resonances of direct mark making in real urban spaces (Figure 9). However, they are also becoming increasingly digital forms, affecting more audiences in the digital realm, and becoming designed and shaped more directly for digital platforms, with the space of the street often transformed into a set or backdrop for the production of digital content. Of all digital platforms, the speed and scale of Instagram has amplified this process, putting pressure on artists to trade in Instagram’s ‘attention economy’ (Goldhaber 1997) and leaving significant challenges for researchers. In the Instagram Era, the quest for fame and notoriety that were part of graffiti’s roots in the working-class boroughs of New York takes on new forms and meanings.

Part One of this book sets out the context of the Instagram Era: the longer media histories that have shaped both graffiti and street art, since Brassaï began taking photographs of drawings and scratching in Parisian alleyways in the 1930s. As a largely ephemeral and geographically dispersed form, visual media have played a key role in the documenting and disseminating of graffiti, from the original New York Times newspaper article reporting the exploits of early taggers in July 1971 to web videos documenting contemporary train painting. This history demonstrates that graffiti and street art can be understood as both distinct cultural forms and ones that are closely connected. Instagram data provides a new way of understanding the relationship between them: how individual artists are located across the two formations and how structures of language, taste and aesthetic preferences are expressed in digital networks.

The analysis of contemporary street art is challenged by its rapid but uneven shift from a marginal, subcultural practice to a highly visible and mainstream, global formation. Currently, street art is in a phase of institutionalization, a process of being organized around a series of key artists, curators, galleries, festivals, magazines and websites, as well as new audiences, an element often neglected in the analysis of this process. Street art now represents a vast global field; its scale and speed means that previous research tools and scholarly approaches – documentary photography, artist interviews and advocacy for its value – may need to be rethought.

Part Two of the book uses the Instagram platform to respond to the research challenges set out in Part One: how to map the complex aesthetic field linking graffiti and street art and also track its global institutionalization? After offering an analysis of the Instagram architecture, I accomplish this with new methods working on vastly different scales. The first uses millions of pieces of data generated by Instagram users to map graffiti and street art on a global scale. Using Instagram data coded into categories, this section discusses how a data-set of the top 100 Instagram accounts for graffiti and street art was generated and what it can tells us about the contours and features of these global art forms.

The chart shows a map of the world with dots representing the cities of origin of the top 100 graffiti writers and street artists. The dots are heavily clustered around Los Angeles, New York and Western Europe, with single dots in Sao Paolo, Cape Town and central Russia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Fig. 3 Cities of origin of graffiti writers and street artists in the top 100 most followed graffiti and street art accounts on Instagram, 2015.

Secondly, I focus on the data produced by a single graffiti site over 4 years of observation, looking at how in the Instagram Era, walls themselves produce patterns and networks of data, including maps of social networks. This analysis provides a way of considering how Instagram has shaped the production of graffiti and street art on the streets. Finally, Part Three of the book brings these two research modes together, exploring in detail the top accounts, providing a reading of the style, visual logic and data-forms of the 100 most prominent street artists, graffiti writers and other key figures and organizations.

The popularity of Instagram for the publishing of graffiti and street art has shifted the terrain for fame-seeking street artists and graffiti writers. This book also sets out to understand the key dynamics of these new conditions and the context of an emerging international field of graffiti and street art that links New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Berlin with other cities and far-flung locations. In what I argue is a distinct Instagram Era, the app transforms both graffiti and the street itself, sometimes not only affecting graffiti’s appearance but also changing its context, production, audiences and meaning. While shaping these dynamics, the architecture of Instagram can also yield data that can help map and describe the contours and networks of graffiti and street art as a global system, for instance, by showing how, using data from Instagram, the cities of origin of the most popular street artists and graffiti writers are clustered around Los Angeles, New York and the major cities of Western Europe (Figure 3).

The Places of Instagram

The story of Instagram itself could begin in many times and places but I’m choosing to begin it with a walk on a beach. In the summer of 2010, young Stanford graduate Kevin Systrom, took a trip with his girlfriend Nicole from his home in San Francisco to the coastal village of Todos Santos on Mexico’s Baja peninsula. It’s more than a day’s drive from San Francisco to Todos Santos – probably Kevin and Nicole flew to La Paz and caught a bus. The town itself had been devastated when its largest freshwater spring dried up in the 1950s, forcing its major industry, the sugar mills, to close. However, since the 1980s the waters from the springs had mysteriously begun flowing again, reviving local businesses and leading to an influx of American expats: painters, hippies and celebrity visitors fleeing Hollywood.

An American travel writer’s account of the town describes a conversation with another expat about the quality of the light along the peninsula – ‘the angle or the quality?’ – which made him ‘see in a different way’. Unlike the gringo enclaves of Cabo or Tijuana, Todos Santos was an authentic, hidden tourist destination, ‘a parallel universe’, that was ‘peacefully far from the United States yet similarly distant from Mexico’ (Cummings 2002).

Systrom was in Todos Santos for a break. He had been working hard with his business partner and fellow-Stanford graduate Mike Krieger on the development of a new mobile phone app. Walking with Nicole along the edge of the Pacific ocean, Systrom describes a breakthrough moment in the Vanity Fair account of Instagram’s beginnings:

On a beach walk one day, Nicole told him she would be reluctant to use the app he was working on because her pictures would never be as good as the ones a mutual friend took. ‘I said, Well, you know what he does to those photos, right? She’s like, No, he just takes good photos. I’m like, No, no, he puts them through filter apps. She’s like, Well, you guys should probably have filters too, right, then? I was like, Huh’.

(Swisher 2013)

Systrom returned to San Francisco and he and Krieger began work on adding filters to their app, launching it within months. The filters became central to Instagram’s design and its initial appeal. Like other origin stories, this one favours the personal over the institutional, seeking to isolate the moments of individual inspiration rather than describe the technological, cultural and institutional forces that shape events.

The setting of Todos Santos is also key to this story. For starters, it was the scene of the first image uploaded to Instagram, a picture of a village dog outside a taco stand looking up at Kevin. This first-ever post is still a site of pilgrimage for Instagram users, but it’s not easy to find, as Instagram is not really designed for this kind of archival work. The original post can only be viewed by manually scrolling back through Kevin’s 1500 posts, which takes several minutes of thumb flicking. ‘Tag back if your fingers r bleeding after scrolling 4 ever lol’ comments one user.

As a location in a ‘parallel universe’, Todos Santos also references the longer history of photography and its place within tourism, often as part of an exoticizing colonial or imperialist logic. The sensual experience of walking along a beach admiring the quality of the light is possible because of a broader history of economic and political relations that are often made invisible by what John Urry (1990) has termed the ‘Tourist Gaze’. Similarly, Nicole’s role in the story, as a reluctant photographer without technical knowledge, reflects the entrenched gendering of photographic practice, whereby women have often been positioned as the objects of photography while simultaneously being excluded from the technical process of making images. Instagram’s filter function would simplify a feature previously available only to photo-nerds and professionals, while also cementing new, and often gendered, genres of display, such as the resurgent selfie.

Though it is on the western coast of the Americas, Todos Santos was also a satellite of the West Coast of Silicon Valley, the epicentre of high-tech corporations and Internet start-ups. As Systrom himself admitted to Vanity Fair, the notion of starting up an Internet company was literally unthinkable on the Massachusetts East coast where he grow up (Swisher 2013). Instagram was a West Coast thing: it could only be imagined and then made real in the cultures of Stanford start-ups and Palo Alto coffee houses in Silicon Valley. Writing in 1995, the year the Internet was opened to commercial activity, Barbrook and Cameron argue that as well as housing clusters of web developers and technical infrastructure for the emerging World Wide Web, the West Coast also produces a powerful ideology of techno-utopianism with global influence. What the authors dub ‘the Californian ideology’ is a heady mix of cultural formations that were previously opposed to one another: ‘the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the high tech industries of Silicon Valley’ (Barbrook and Cameron 1995). The strange ‘hybrid orthodoxy’ somehow blends ‘the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies’ (Barbrook and Cameron 1995).

Barbrook and Cameron argue that Silicon Valley is based on this ideological fusion of hippies and yuppies, which promotes self-made individualism and a free-market fetishism that is dependent on a ‘wilful blindness towards the other – much less positive – features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental degradation’. The area of Silicon Valley has also come to personify the broken dreams and perversion of the original ideals of digital networks as spaces of freedom. As the character J. Karacehennem screams in Jarrett Kobek’s novel I Hate the Internet, ‘San Francisco…you are the worst place on earth!…You have taken the last true good thing, the initial utopian vision of the Internet, and you have perverted it into a series of interlocking fiefdoms with no purpose other than serving advertisements’ (Kobek 2016: 267). Instagram is a product of this West Coast culture, and though it now appears ubiquitous and placeless and services a global constituency, it is important to be attuned to its embedded politics, perhaps signalled by some of its places of origin such as Todos Santos and the Bay Area.

The Multiplicitous Platform

The rise of Instagram was dramatic and is often illustrated by big numbers. From its launch in October 2010, Instagram grew to one million users before the end of the year, prompting a flurry of investment. After releasing a version for Android phones in April 2012, Instagram was sold to Facebook less than a week later, entering the ‘unicorn club’ of Internet start-ups valued at US $1 billion or more. By late 2015, it had surpassed Twitter in user numbers, reaching 600 million users by the end of 2016. Instagram now stands as an iconic Internet start-up, dazzling investors with its sheer number of users, rates of expansion and its tantalizing measures of user engagement.

This book incorporates some of the key lessons from other Internet scholars and platform studies about the conceptual and practical boundaries of its object. Most people experience Instagram as an app on their phone in their hand, but this is only Instagram’s ‘front end’: it is also a legal and corporate entity run for profit, a collection of staff (many of them talented software engineers and designers), as well as a string of computer codes, procedures and protocols. Instagram can also be considered as an archive of content (more than 40 billion images), of users (now more than one billion), as well as countless, shifting relationships between these account nodes, along with myriad other forms of data. Instagram is also digital architecture and interface design, revenues and business models, share prices and stockholders and the geography and gender, race, age and class of its users. Instagram includes its formal rules and ‘guidelines’, its secret decisions and its informal norms and types of resistance, both everyday and organized. The world of Instagram is also inhabited by a range of non-human actors, such as bots as well as burner accounts and huge chunks of spam. The point is not to take the platform itself at face value but to look beyond, around and underneath. The platform is an artificial horizon to be overcome.

Instagram also exceeds the boundaries of its ownership, design and use: it is also possible to consider Instagram as a kind of cultural logic, so ubiquitous as to be emblematic of a historical period, the Instagram Era. Instagram focussed the energy of broader technological, social and cultural change: the rise of mobile devices, the explosion of mobile photography, cultural transitions from a text to image and the popularity and power of social media. It also offers what consumers supposedly want: tactility, speed, simplicity of design and use, control to customize content and a practical solution for managing unprecedented numbers of images and relationships. Instagram has also promoted new grammars of communications (hashtags, Internet slang and emojis) and new genres of images.

On the one hand, Instagram promotes collaboration and connection: it can be used to breach boundaries, secure social bonds and change minds. On the other, Instagram is seen to promote negative effects such as narcissism, self-surveillance, emotional insecurity, ‘Instagram Envy’ and the dreaded #FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Instagram helps turn the world into what Franco Berardi (2005) terms an ‘info-sphere’, a universe in which the world is optically flattened and human experience is likewise reduced in resolution.

Instagram is designed around an ‘open’ architecture, but only in the sense of offering multiple points of entry to users, not in the more important sense of being open source that predominated in an earlier phase of the Internet. In the era of apps, a user’s ability to control and customize how programmes work is sacrificed for ease of use, with the app designed for mass international take-up. Apps are ‘fiefdoms’ or shopping malls. The resulting infrastructure is monetized, with value created through data warehousing and advertising revenue.

Instagram’s openness allows users to approach content from different directions, for example, through a feed of followed accounts, through the explore function, via hashtags or monitoring the likes and follows of other users. This openness produces a splintering on Instagram: sometimes the app still looks a little like Burbn, the original prototype ‘check-in’ style app that Systrom and Krieger were working on before ‘pivoting’ to Instagram. For some users, Instagram is a giant personal photo album, for others a global archive or library. Instagram also presents itself as a Disney-esque, family-oriented photography community that outlaws female nipples and genitalia while also harbouring millions of pornographic images, often under private accounts and coded hashtags. Sometimes Instagram resembles a shopping mall, as users stroke objects trapped behind glass – not the glass windows of the original nineteenth-century shopping arcades but the glass of our mobile phone screens. Instagram also functions as a motor of cognitive capitalism, farming the behaviour of its user in a giant feedback factory, as a global game in which increasing one’s numbers of