The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kyiv

Lev Manovich analyzes the use of Instagram during Maidan. Using computational and data visualization techniques, the project explores 13,208 Instagram images shared by 6,165 people in the central area of Kyiv during between February 17 and 22, 2014. What can visual social media tell us about the experiences of people during social upheavals? If we look at images of Kyiv published by many global media outlets during the revolution, the whole city is reduced to what was taking place on its main square. On Instagram however images of protesters appear next to the images of the typical Instagram subjects. Most people continued their lives. The exceptional co-exists with the everyday. The project analyzes the content of images and also non-visual data that accompanies them: most frequent tags, the use of English, Ukrainian, and Russian languages, dates and times when images their shared, and their geo-locations.

Together with Jay Chow, Alise Tifentale, Mehrdad Yazdani and an essay by Elizabeth Los.