From midnight May 16 to midnight May 17, 2012, I posted an image to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram every five minutes: 288 images over 24 hours. Each photograph was selected randomly from my iPhone camera roll and filtered through Instagram’s early visual aesthetic to create a false sense of coherence.
The captions combine found tweets, platform language, overheard conversations, hashtags, and deliberate nonsense. Images and text rarely align.
The project treats posting itself as both subject and performance. The randomness surfaces what normally stays buried: bad selfies, accidental abstractions, inside jokes, images that would usually be deleted. By Hour 16, one caption reads: “My timing was off but I posted the photo anyway. #needtostayrelavent” Meaning comes less from any individual photograph than from repetition, exhaustion, and the pressure to stay visible.
24-Hour Flu catches a specific moment when social media still felt like participation, while already showing the compulsive patterns that would come to define it. The work doesn’t stand outside those systems to critique them. It performs them until the absurdity and fatigue become impossible to ignore. What felt compulsive then feels normal now.
Essay written: May 2026
