Social Media and Image-Making: In Conversation with Arko Datto

Many of Arko Datto’s projects such as Captive Cams, Panopticams and Dinos of Hindostan—existing currently as images on his numerous Instagram handles—explore questions about image-making in the age of social media. Some of these include: How does one perceive the techniques or tools offered by social media as an integral part of image-making? Do social media platforms go beyond being modes of display? Datto’s growing disillusionment with the flatness of websites has led to Instagram being the primary way to access most of his work.

In this continuing conversation with Datto, we examine the affordances of the social media platform and other image-capturing features that supplement the narratives in his work. Datto cites the example of images from Captive Cams—a project where he explores the surveillance of animals—to discuss forms such as the boomerang and time-lapse. While creating work from an inexhaustible amount of footage taken from live cameras present in animal enclosures at zoos, such features become an intrinsic way of communicating the repetitive or endless nature of these lives.

Captive Cams is a part of Datto's larger investigation into different kinds of surveillance, explored through the Cybersex and Panopticams projects among others. Datto takes to the platform as a space that naturally facilitates collaboration. It allows for the creation of a body of work that can be seen as a whole, while it is also ongoing. “I do not use Instagram to promote the projects but they are intrinsic to the way a narrative is built,” says Datto. Besides images, these projects feature newspaper and journal articles, memes and other supplementary literature that Datto brings together with a curatorial instinct.

In this conversation, Datto also discusses some of his ongoing projects such as Pik-Nik, where he explores picnicking as a cultural practice across Eastern India during festival seasons and how that has changed during the pandemic.

_{(Featured Image: From the series Pik-Nik. Arko Datto. 2014-Ongoing.)} 

Interview with Sukanya Baskar, 3rd Feb 2021.