anna Gibbs

1. Instagram is a mall. Most, if not all, of the internet is also a mall. 2. Sometimes visiting the mall feels like a stuffy, consumerist wasteland of excess. Sometimes visiting the mall feels like a place to marvel at ideas manifested into material - what people are thinking, and how they designed these thoughts. 3. How much of our life has been spent at malls doing everything but shopping? The mall is a marketplace, the goal is to sell. But what is the marketplace to the one who has no interest in buying? It then becomes an in-between space. A social space, a people-watching opportunity, a place to interact with objects and ads and material and humans in a similar way one would in a museum. 4. If you do not buy into something, it cannot be sold to you.  5. (But some things will always sneak in, we are only human.) 6. Can we experience all of the illusions without giving our soul to it? Can we say - I love these silk pajamas, I am having fun being this being in this outfit, but that is where it stops. It is not my identity, nor does it give me any joy or belonging that I don’t already carry within. 7. The intrigue of lifestyle existed long before we commodified it.  8. It is difficult at times to share an aesthetic eye and honor outfits and objects within the context of a marketplace. What feels creative to me (a slow flash-on video of my hand caressing an object I find pretty) with gratitude (tagging the creator) will always linger within the context of the mall, the marketplace, regardless of intention. 9. Everything, IRL and URL, can be perceived as a mall. This is the world we live in. 10. There is value found in experiencing the mall, even enjoying it, without buying anything.