Every time you post a photo to Instagram, it loses a tiny bit of quality. It’s not really noticeable for a single upload, but if you save and repost the photo over and over, the quality loss becomes extreme. It’s a concept known as “generation loss,” and is the subject of artist Pete Ashton‘s project “I Am Sitting In Stagram (2015).”



The experiment is a variation on composer Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” experiment in which Lucier recorded himself talking and then rerecorded the recording over and over until his voice becomes unintelligible.

In Ashton’s project, the artist posted a photo to Instagram, snapped a screenshot, and then reposted that screenshot to the service. He did this 90 times in a row. Here’s a video showing his process:

Here’s a copy of the first photo he uploaded to Instagram:

…and here’s what the photo looked like after 90 saves and uploads:

Here’s what the generation loss looks like as a grid of images:

Ashton chose to do 90 iterations because that way he could fit a 6 frame per second time-lapse of the degradation into Instagram’s video limit. This is the result:

A video posted by I Am Still Sitting In Stagram (@sitting_in_stagram2) on Feb 7, 2015 at 4:04pm PST

Lucier did the same experiment using a second photo as well. You can see the results of that attempt on his project website. Here’s the video for it:

A video posted by I Am Sitting In Stagram (@sitting_in_stagram) on Feb 7, 2015 at 8:00am PST

You can find each of the individual uploads for both experiments in his dedicated Twitter accounts, @sitting_in_stagram and @sitting_in_stagram2.

(via Art Pete via PopPhoto)

P.S. If you thought this experiment was interesting, check out what happens when you save JPEGs hundreds of times: here’s a video and here’s a series of images. A similar experiment was also done with YouTube videos back in 2010.