24-Hour Flu Celebrating 24 Hours of Being Part of the Problem

At its core, 24-Hour Flu is an experiment in time, randomness, and the compulsive aesthetics of digital culture. Spanning 24 consecutive hours from May 16–17, 2012, the project unfolds as a live performance in which an image is manually posted every five minutes to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The result is a cascade of 288 images, each selected not through careful curation but by a random number generator pulling from the artist’s personal iPhone archive.

The premise is deceptively simple: expose the structures and habits that underlie social media by accelerating them. What emerges is not merely a portrait of a day, but a meta-commentary on the performative act of sharing — its tedium, its spectacle, and its inherent narcissism. The work calls attention to the pressure to remain visible, relevant, and responsive in digital spaces, even when the content itself has little to say.

While the images range widely in content — from overprocessed still lives and Instagram-filtered abstractions to spontaneous snapshots, inside jokes, and work-in-progress shots — the real subject is the act of posting itself. By stripping the selection process of intention and embracing the artifacts of casual phone photography, 24-Hour Flu elevates the discarded and the overlooked. It’s a gesture that is both critical and oddly affectionate: a love letter to the nonsense we leave behind in our camera rolls.

Each image is paired with a caption, drawn from a mix of found tweets, reappropriated text, and platform-native syntax. These titles are as much a part of the work as the images themselves — fragments of internet language that float between sincerity, sarcasm, and pure noise. Many captions reference themselves or other posts in the sequence, creating a closed loop of semi-coherent language. The result is an echo chamber of digital expression, mimicking the way content online often feels recursive, impersonal, and ephemeral.

What’s compelling is the tension between control and chaos. Though the rhythm of posting is precisely timed, the content is entirely uncurated. This tension foregrounds the absurdity of algorithmic logic: randomness pretending to be relevance, curation without meaning. Some repeated themes emerge — selfies, TV screens, Americana, pop culture — but they appear as symptoms, not symbols. The repetition is numbing, intentional, and reflective of the way online platforms reward constant production over thoughtful engagement.

As the project moves into its later hours, the tone grows increasingly surreal and exhausted. Hours 16 through 23 overflow with layered absurdities: a Lego Batman longing for coffee, a photo of a wall crack mistaken for a man in “high water work pants,” and a still life of bottles of poison captioned simply “True <3.” Juxtapositions between sincerity and cynicism become sharper, and thematic fatigue sets in — not just in content but in affect. These later frames encapsulate the feeling of scrolling past your own relevance in real time.

The project also invites consideration of labor. Posting an image every five minutes for 24 hours is both a conceptual provocation and a physical demand. It mirrors the exhaustion many feel in the face of digital productivity: the expectation to share, perform, and entertain without pause. That fatigue is woven into the DNA of the work, turning a tongue-in-cheek joke into a quietly poignant meditation on burnout.

Formally, the images adopt the square frame and visual language of early Instagram, unified by a single filter applied to give a loose coherence. This uniformity creates the illusion of intentionality — an aesthetic veneer for an otherwise chaotic archive. It questions whether consistency in style is enough to signify meaning, or whether we have trained ourselves to find narrative in any sufficiently polished stream of content.

Ultimately, 24-Hour Flu does not offer solutions. It celebrates its own futility, its own self-aware descent into irrelevance. But in doing so, it lays bare the mechanisms that drive so much of our digital lives: the need to be seen, the pressure to produce, and the quiet absurdity of it all. It’s a work that resists traditional critique because it parodies critique itself, presenting a reality so familiar it no longer feels strange.

This is not a project about photography in the traditional sense — it’s about what photography becomes once it’s filtered through the algorithms, aesthetics, and compulsions of the feed. In this space, images are stripped of context, flattened into content, and judged by their ability to momentarily capture attention. 24-Hour Flu turns that ecosystem back on itself, revealing how meaning, authorship, and even intention dissolve into the endlessly scrolling performance of relevance.

Essay written: May 2025