SoftwareStudies

Instagram launched in 2010. In its early years, it was quite different from what it is today. In 2012, we began downloading posts shared in various cities over a specific period of time - several days to several months. We used official Instagram API which allowed such downloads until 2016).

Here are three visualizations - each shows 50k images shared over a few days within a 5x5 km area in San Francisco, Bangkok, or Tokyo. Time: from 2.5 to 5 days. This represents about 20% of all Instagram posts shared in these places during this period.

The radius represents the average color (hue), and the average lightness determines the angle.

High-res originals can be downloaded from Flickr (6000 × 6000) - follow project link below.

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Project info:

Phototrails is a research project developed by Lev Manovich, Nadav Hochman and Jay Chow developed. We downloaded and analyzed over 2.3 million publicly shared Instagram photos from 13 cities worldwide.

The project uses experimental media visualization techniques to explore visual patterns, dynamics, and structures in user-generated photos, examining both metadata (upload dates, filters, geolocation) and visual content (hue, lightness, contrast).

Phototrails was the first academic study of Instagram’s large-scale visual data, with findings published in First Monday in July 2013.

More: https://zurl.co/5GAZP. (phototrails . info)

I tried to summarize in 4 slides what I study now, how, and most importantly - why.

If you going to Art Basel and are interested in digital art - this June 15th Digital Art Summit looks really good. Speakers include Christian Paul (Whitney), Margit Rosen (ZKM), Trevor Paglen (Co-curator of Art Basel 01) and many others.

https://zurl.co/qRqAD

What is more important for artistic success: talent or connections? This Columbia Business School quantitative study suggests that the number and type of connections of many early 20th c artists were more responsible for them becoming famous than the originality of their works.

(Originality scores were assigned by ML and art historians. The two rankings have a big correlation.) The dataset used is 80 artists included in the 2013 landmark MoMA “Inventing Abstraction” exhibition.

Obviously, a hundred years later, the art and culture worlds are quite different. But at least historically, this study is extremely interesting. This result partly fits my own feelings about art history. Many people who became most famous deserved it. But there were even more people who were at least as interesting, who, for various reasons (such as a lack of networking), now only occupy a marginal place - or none at all. (Obviously gender, ethnicity, and the place where artists were working were equally crucial - along with artist network strength.)

https://zurl.co/tmEeF

From the interview -

Question (Noor van Eekelen): Next Nature views technology as second nature: what was once new, experimental, and exciting eventually becomes commonplace. Suppose we speak to you again in 50 years. How do you think people will look back on our current ideas about creativity and AI? Will AI have become just as ordinary by then?

LM Answer: AI will almost certainly become ordinary in the way electricity is ordinary: infrastructure that shapes everything without anyone stopping to reflect on it. This is what happened to computers in general, and later to the web and mobile phones. This ubiquity of AI is already partly here, and it will likely become full in about 4–6 years.

Regarding "creativity"— in the West, the concept of "creativity" and its close association with "art" developed only in the Romantic period - so only about 200 years ago. But still, this term was used much less frequently until the beginning of the 21st century. In the early 2000s, growing competition and easier access to foreign markets (the effects of globalization) motivated a new paradigm in business. Your company now needs to be 'creative' and it needs to innovate constantly. The global success of Apple and Samsung in the 2000s, based on their innovative strategies, became an example for all businesses.

Later still, the idea took hold that creativity is highly desirable for society as a whole and for individuals in general, and became a new universal social value in the 2010s. Everybody should be creative — and computer technologies are here to help us. (Which means that we all, to some extent, should become 'artists'.) The new term 'creative technologist' that became popular in the 2010s is an example of these trends. This idea led to a different assumption — that AI and technology in general should help individuals and companies to be creative and innovative. And at the same time it also led to the questions constantly being asked today — can AI be truly creative?

If creativity (and also "art" as it is understood today) concept did not even exist in human history until recently, we can also imagine that they will become less important in the future. So I hope that in 50 years, people will be asking different types of questions, as opposed to still obsessing about "creativity and AI."

When did photography really become “automated”? Not just with AI or digital cameras, but across two centuries of technical changes in capture, editing, and distribution.

I just finished a long interactive timeline that maps this process from early 19th‑century photography to AI image generation today, building on ideas from my dissertation and later articles.

https://levmanovich.github.io/manovich-interactive/photo/

Why do most artists struggle today? And why it won't be fixed?

I offer only one narrative among many — and many will not agree. However, I think that tracing the arc from the pre-modern "golden age" through modernism, its eventual acceptance, and the social turn of the 21st century helps explain a crisis that isn't going away. Too many artists, too few buyers, and a widening gap between what institutions celebrate and what most people outside of the art world actually care about.

Swipe for the argument →

If you are teaching any university classes right now - can you help me? I am collecting global responses for a simple (but large-scale) survey about people's lifestyles & cultural likes. It takes < 10 min to fill out the form. If you can send the link to your students and encourage them to fill it out, this will be great. And of course, feel free to fill it yourself:

https://forms.gle/PNfwDu5S3hn3Sh4P8

The aggregated results will be used in a new cultural analytics & visualization project I am working on — and of course, all results and visualizations will be published online.

Lab's earlier projects:

https://lab.culturalanalytics.info/p/projects.html

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Image in this post - from our project Phototrails (2013) - first to visualize large collections of Instagram photos:

http://phototrails.info/instagram-cities/

Join me for an online seminar " Medium That Thinks: Generative AI, Media Cognition, and Artistic Creation " on May 13th, 10:00 UTC/GMT (The Department of Film, Theatre & Television, The University of Reading, UK).

Please RSVP to receive a link:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-medium-that-thinks-generative-ai-media-cognition-and-artistic-creation-tickets-1987383797437?aff=oddtdtcreator