Interactive projection reimagining Instagram without algorithms, restoring human agency within social media environments.
Slowgram is an interactive design fiction and live digital intervention that reimagines how we encounter social media in an era increasingly shaped by automation and algorithmic control. Built using the public Instagram API, Slowgram subverts conventional platform mechanics by removing algorithmic curation and amplifying human presence within a digital ecosystem saturated by AI-generated content. The work invites audiences to participate directly: by using the application, they become part of a live projection that renders posts in a temporality and order determined not by machine optimization but by human intention.
As AI-generated “slop” proliferates across major platforms, the signal-to-noise ratio of digital culture continues to decline. Glitch artists—once thriving within Instagram’s community-driven creative spaces—now face the diminishing visibility that accompanies monetization pressures, data extraction, and automated content ranking. Slowgram responds to this collapse of the early internet commons by offering a speculative return to slower, more relational modes of digital interaction.
The installation consists of a three-channel projection, allowing multiple users to engage simultaneously. Each interface reveals what Instagram might look like without algorithmic intervention—foregrounding creative expression, presence, and community instead of surveillance-driven engagement metrics. Any attempt by Meta to block, throttle, or interfere with the work becomes part of the artwork itself, exposing the hidden operations of platform governance and its influence over human relationships.
Through this intervention, Slowgram asks viewers to reflect on how social media instrumentalizes real social bonds, transforming them into data for behavioral prediction and commercial value. By interrupting these automated mechanisms, Slowgram offers a speculative, more humane digital horizon rooted in autonomy, visibility, and collective agency.
Slowgram is produced by GIANT GLITCHES, an imaginary design group of GFZK Society for Contemporary Concepts (Potsdam), working at the intersection of glitch art, AI critique, and digital sovereignty.
