Digital Moments, Liquid Experiences: A visual analysis of our uses of smartphone photography

Digital Moments, Liquid Experiences explores how our digital behaviors of taking and sharing pictures with smartphones are impacting the way we sense-experience a moment. By embracing the same elements of a generation immersed in its smartphone photography practices of clicks, edits, and shares, and applying a theoretical framework between phenomenology, sociology, and media theories, this is an interactive photo-exhibition for people to sense-experience the fluidity of their digital behaviors. Exploring concepts of traditional intellectuals such as Zygmunt Bauman, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes and Friedrich Nietzsche, to contemporary media theorists such as Douglas Rushkoff, Lev Manovich, and Jose Van Dijck, this production applies an interdisciplinary approach to analyze, with sociological depth, the patterns of how we are using smartphone digital technology. Since tourists have long relied on technology for capturing and mediating their moments, the theoretical framework was based on tourists’ interactions with smartphone cameras and their practices of sharing images on Instagram. Inspired by the work of renowned graphic design agencies that transform places into immersive experiences for visitors, this project applies the effects of visuals and motion strategically designed to encourage discourses about our behaviors of smartphone photography. It contributes with its creative strategy to communicate with a generation that has been digitally active in their virtual worlds but passively experiencing what surrounds them.