Advertisement
Tech

#Selfeed shows you every Instagram selfie in real time

Unsurprisingly, there’s an awful lot of duckface.

Photo of EJ Dickson

EJ Dickson

Article Lead Image

Is there anything in the world that better encapsulates the self-entitled, navel-gazing, and generally obnoxious attitude of millennials than the Instagram selfie? As it turns out, there actually is: #Selfeed, a website that displays all Instagram photos tagged with the #selfie hashtag in real time.

Featured Video

Created by artists Erik Carter, Tyler Madsen, and Jillian Mayer, #Selfeed debuted at the Utah Museum of Fine Art in January 2014. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a nonstop deluge of duckface, forced smiles, and awkward arm contortions in the uber-flattering Hudson photo filter.


Screengrab via Selfeed

Because none of the photos show up on screen for longer than half a second, you don’t really have time to evaluate each one individually. But unlike other selfie-aggregating apps, like the Hot-Or-Not-esque Facefeed, #Selfeed is less about passing judgment and more about assembling one communal selfie out of a mass of individual images, like a giant Frankenstein’s monster of duckface selfies.

Advertisement

“Most of the selfies that are aggregated are self-portraits with one singular figure,” Selfeed’s creators told Time. “On Selfeed, these figures exist alone, but together.”


 

What’s most striking about #Selfeed, however, is not how it reflects the community spirit of Instagram or whatever; it’s how similar the selfies look to each other when you see them presented en masse. This seems to have been the #Selfeed creators’ intention: “By co-opting images that users post in an attempt to manage their online identity,” Selfeed “highlights the Internet’s open source, cut-and-paste culture,” Mayer’s artist statement for the project reads.

Considering the narcissism inherent to the act of taking a photo of yourself and uploading it on social media, it’s ironic that despite the selfie-takers’ desire to broadcast their individuality on Instagram, on #Selfeed they all ultimately end up looking the same.

Advertisement

H/T Time | Photo by grahambob68/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)

 
The Daily Dot