We created minutiae — an anonymous, anti-social photo project — as an experiment: part artwork, part performance, part collective diary. It grew from a shared fascination with the “in-between” — the unnoticed fragments that make up most of our lives. Our inspiration comes from durational, conceptual artists who worked with systems, time, and chance, including Sol LeWitt and On Kawara. minutiae carries those ideas into the digital present, using technology not to curate life but to reveal it.

The concept was born in 2014 while Martin Adolfsson and Daniel J Wilson were part of the New Museum’s art and tech incubator, NEW INC, in New York City. What began as a small experiment has evolved into a living archive of contemporary life created by strangers around the world. Together they record what simply exists — a portrait of the present, one minute at a time. A bespoke version of the app and a Limited Edition book are included in Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library collection.

The project has been exhibited at the New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo Art Book Fairs, and featured in Hyperallergic, Monocle, Wired, and the Financial Times.

MARTIN  ADOLFSSON

Martin Adolfsson is a Swedish-born photographer and artist based in New York City. For more than two decades, his work has explored how technology and human behavior shape the ways we see, connect, and remember. His first book, Suburbia Gone Wild (2013), examined the rise of the global middle class through staged photographs of model homes from Shanghai to Johannesburg.

The project revealed an uncanny sameness within our built environments—a realization that later shaped minutiae, where thousands of people unknowingly capture parallel moments in time from every corner of the world. His projects can be found here.

DANIEL J WILSON

Daniel J Wilson is an artist and filmmaker whose work spans documentary, installation, and digital media.

Before minutiae, he often sought to capture people in unguarded, natural states: driving a taxi on the night shift while recording passenger conversations, or experimenting with interactive forms of storytelling. His experience as a filmmaker, balancing what appears on screen against what is left behind, led to an interest in what escapes documentation altogether. minutiae grew from that impulse—an attempt to preserve the fleeting, unscripted beauty of everyday life, the moments that usually go unseen.

He is currently a Ph.D. candidate studying cognitive neuroscience at the University of Toronto.