The Garden of Social Media Delights
"The Garden of Social Media Delights" is an ongoing artistic project exploring image production, online spectatorship, information flows, and collective memory in the digital age. Drawing on publicly available images, texts, and data from the internet, the project employs computer programming, collage, machine learning, and digital re-encoding to transform fragments scattered across online feeds into large-scale visual works. Using iconic images from art history as visual frameworks, it reconsiders the relationships between photography, images, and reality.
Photography is a uniquely accessible medium. As photographic technology has developed, taking pictures no longer requires specialist training or sophisticated equipment. Almost anyone can produce, circulate, and share images at any moment. Social media has amplified this accessibility, bringing countless records of everyday life together into a vast and constantly evolving social archive. At the same time, photography maintains a distinctive relationship with reality. A photograph is neither reality itself nor a complete representation of it, yet it usually originates from a person, object, place, or moment that once existed. This connection to the world sets photography apart from other visual media and gives even the most ordinary online images a particular documentary significance.
Most of these images were never intended to be art. People photograph furniture they wish to sell, bedrooms available for rent, gatherings with friends, or moments they want to share with others. Created for practical or personal reasons, these images often disappear into the endless flow of new content. Yet when thousands of them are collected and rearranged, they begin to take on meanings beyond their original contexts. Connections emerge between individual lives, revealing shared experiences of consumption, housing, social interaction, emotion, and social change.
The project's artistic approach draws directly on these two characteristics of photography. On the one hand, it brings together the enormous volume of images produced through everyday participation in photography. On the other, through collecting, classifying, analysing, and reconstructing these images, it seeks to uncover and reinterpret the traces of reality embedded within them. Computer programming becomes a way of looking, allowing the artist to observe and process vast quantities of information that a conventional camera could never capture directly. Meanwhile, familiar images from art history become visual structures that can be continually rewritten, bringing together desires, relationships, and social experiences from different historical moments within a single composition.
The project also considers how the internet has transformed the act of looking. People share images of their own lives while gaining access to the lives of strangers through the photographs they encounter online. This form of looking moves between curiosity, voyeurism, participation, and consumption. At the same time, algorithms and platform structures increasingly determine which images become visible and how we interpret them. Images therefore do more than document reality; they also participate in its circulation, organisation, and construction.
Rooted in the observational tradition of documentary photography, the project extends the photographic field from physical environments into digital spaces. As more of our social interactions, emotional expressions, and encounters with public events take place online, the internet is no longer merely a reflection of the physical world but an integral part of contemporary life itself.
"The Garden of Social Media Delights" attempts to transform these fleeting and fragmented digital traces into a continuously growing social archive. In doing so, it raises a question: As our understanding of the world becomes increasingly mediated by images, texts, data, and algorithms, how can documentary photography record a reality that is itself increasingly constructed through images?
Text by Haohui Liu
