What You Save

Sophia Davirro

What You Save is a project that was born out of my lifetime of collecting, from physical objects during my adolescence, to now in the era of digital media. As children, we may have collected items around us such as a box of rocks, insects, stuffed animals, stolen items from a sibling’s room, or crayon drawings on sticky pieces of paper. As our curiosity grows, so do our collections, kept in the closet, soon forgotten but forever representative of a specific time in our life. While the types of objects we collect may change, the desire to leave traces of ourselves behind doesn’t.

The visual content we consume online is similar in many ways to these conceptions of standard collecting, but also largely informed by the digital platforms they are circulated within. After surveying users’ saved content on Instagram, I compiled the found material to digitally distort and recontextualize visual content in the form of an animation. The piece utilizes elements of pastiche to create a new digital identity and emphasizes the reproduction of images on social media through its manipulated content and collaged style. In taking apart and putting together pieces of images almost like a puzzle, I demonstrate how these individually saved digital objects are a synecdoche, or part of a larger whole that is the collective circulation of images on Instagram. I hope this project allows you to take a look at your own digital collections and consider their role in not just your own life, but in the greater, expansive online archive of digital objects.