Our development for this assignment has also been informed by the Week 10 reading by Bettina Frankham, A poetic approach to documentary. One key idea that will be guiding us in developing our prompt is her statement that “in a poetic approach to documentary, the issue becomes one of finding the balance between offering a definitive, unquestionable single pathway at one extreme and presenting a loose collection of raw documents at the other” (pg. 145).

This is relevant to our prompt as we intend to establish a connection between all of the clips in our Instagram feed to produce a holistic view of these spaces. One way of doing this is by framing our videos so that they align with a certain aspect of the overall composition, and in turn create a graphic match. This creates a relationship between both images and allows the viewer to notice this association between natural and manmade spaces. The videos in each post will also serve as individual documents of noticing.

The Instagram accounts @sweetener and @iamphoenixproject achieve this through the “puzzle” layouts of their feeds in which each post works together to create an overall composition, while still allowing the viewer to click into the posts that comprise it. These facets then become “glimpses rather than ideal chronicles” (Frankham, p. 140), creating a sense of interconnectedness through making graphic associations. I feel that this approach to our prompt would enhance our subject matter of humans and manmade and natural environments, as we intend to demonstrate their entwined nature.

Frankham also states that “audiences are becoming more accustomed to open forms that either require greater levels of interpretation and participation or that offer further non-sequiturs, adding to the overall experience of fractured daily life” (pg. 144). Similarly, Brown states in The Aesthetics of New Media Art that “what distinguishes new media art from mainstream digital art are the new possibilities generated by the Internet based hardware and software” (2015). I feel that this best describes our approach to the form our assignment will take as the platform of Instagram allows for an alternative, interactive insight into our patterns of noticing.