Slowgram is a design fiction that hijacks Instagram’s public API to strip away algorithmic curation, restoring visibility and presence to real human activity within a platform saturated by automated content and AI-generated noise. Presented as an interactive three-screen installation, it invites audiences to submit their own handles and experience social media without the commercial mediation of engagement-optimized feeds.
The project treats AI’s classificatory power as a kind of digital Demiurge — not reflecting reality, but actively shaping what becomes visible, legible, and possible. It draws a historical line from Instagram’s current trajectory to the collapse of earlier internet commons (Usenet, BBSes) under unregulated noise, and asks what agency looks like when the infrastructures mediating perception are optimized for behavioral capture rather than human connection. If Meta throttles or blocks the piece, that response becomes part of the artwork itself: evidence of the very control the project is exposing.
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.
