Jason Eppink's Catalogue of Creative Triumphs

Autogram is an application that automates the selection, captioning, and posting of photos to Instagram.

For various reasons (distrust of companies and governments, shifting communities, the generally toxic and bad faith nature of online discourse) I mainly opt out of social media these days, but I’ve accepted that much of the world still operates on these platforms, so I’ve been working on ways to participate in them on my own terms.

Many of my friends and acquaintances use Instagram (and expect others to use it) to casually keep tabs on their communities. By not participating, I have seen relationships fade away, which is a bummer. I regularly snap photos with my pocket device, but I’ve resisted investing any time into a new photo platform since I gave up on Flickr. Plus, I’ve seen how people can live their lives to perform for their social feeds, and I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’m tempted to go down that path.

So I wrote Autogram, which keeps my friends posted on my life while handling all the decision-making. Plus, since this all goes through a machine vision algorithm that pretty arbitrarily selects and captions the photos, I also get to make fun of the whole Instagramming endeavor.

Materials

Autogram on GitHub (AppleScript)
Exhibition History
Credits

Automator


Available in the following departments: Aesthetic Interventions, Experiments, Other Benevolent Mischief, Rapid Prototypes, Unauthorized Happenings