User vs Participant
It’s true: you’ll have to go through a boggling 1440 days before you’ve completed your cycle. It is a long time, we won’t water it down for you, and at some point, you’re likely to stop thinking about, well, things you think about when you’re taking a photo. At which point you’ve entered what we’ll call (we just made this up) participation mode. (But more of this in a moment.)
This is how it works: minutiae sends out a notification to all participants across the globe at the exact same minute, asking them to take a photo of whatever is in front of them—you probably knew this.
But what this means is that minutiae is not about you per se, but about the contours of the moment, you find yourself in. But it also means, let’s face it, that that moment is getting briefly interrupted.
minutiae is not about you per se, but about the contours of the moment, you find yourself in.
We understand that the notification might roll in at an unsuited, busy moment; it might pop up when we’re just not feeling it and the moment itself shakes its metaphysical head… We get that after a few months and some notifications missed, you might get into the habit of not even bothering. But we also know that, at times, you’ll take a quick snapshot as naturally and elegantly as taking a sip of coffee. That is to say, you’ll forget about taking “good” photos, and you’ll just take them.
We’re not inviting you to “use” minutiae, as there’s nothing to use, really. We’re inviting you to “use” your camera, sure, but the app itself has barely any use other than that of a strange type of storage.
We hope to create a participatory-experience, not a user-experience.
We’re inviting you to, in a way, accept the absurdity of it all. Yes, you’ll interrupt busy moments, yes, you’ll take “whatever” photos sometimes because you don’t feel like it and the moment itself doesn’t feel like it, and yes, you’ll miss chances and possibly many. Along the way, you will take some special photos…as well as some photos that could be described as artifacts of visual boredom.
We hope to create a participatory-experience, not a user-experience.
But so what? That’s the beauty of it. A mosaic, a collage, a potpourri, a mishmash of points (in time) you don’t even remember at that point.
It means to honor the space that fills most of our lives—to memorialize a trivial moment just because it happened and not because it mattered. Our brains are designed to remember compelling moments in our lives, a tendency that’s aggravated with social media, but we think that most people would like to make memories of little moments that perhaps, though not terribly important, acquired meaning simply because they were noticed. Maybe they’ll allow us to reminisce, maybe we notice a pattern, maybe they mark the beginning or end of something important in our lives.
minutiae is an odd kind of social media, but we don’t want you going in expecting to use our app in the same way you use or think about other social media platforms. You don’t get to choose how to connect with others or whom to connect with since the app does this for you—and not even because it’s ultimately arbitrary. We “use” Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok in the same way we use anything else, from TVs to kitchen tools—their purpose is, in fact, their use. You “use” Instagram by indulging in its features and functions, but you’re not part of Instagram, but a user, enjoyer…customer.
You are participating in a collaboration between the artist and yourself for the purpose of developing an unbiased visual record of our times
Why do we emphasize the “participation” aspect?
Because by getting involved, you are part of minutiae, and you are participating in a collaboration between the artist and yourself for the purpose of developing an unbiased visual record of our times that’ll be available—hopefully—for at least 500 years but more on that in a future post…