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Music

All of Instagram's Biggest Cliches in One Seamless Music Video

Our mirror selfies and abs shots make a cliche animation highlighting social media's unoriginality.
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Social media is rife with cliched images, we're all guilty of it, churning out simulacra into the digital abyss. Musician and animator Hiérophante has utilized this unoriginality and turned hundreds of images uploaded to Instagram into a music video for his song "Clichés." Highlighting the hashtags he found them under like #peacesign or #salad. It's a journey into the homogeny of the platform.

The classic mirror selfie is there, as are many overused poses and shots, from the king of travel cliches like holding the Leaning Tower of Pisa up to the artful salad shot. And it's not just regular people who are guilty, oversharing celebs like Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, and The Rock are here too with their go-to pose in different settings.

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Looking at it you would assume that some kind of algorithm was used to coordinate the images which have their own rhythmn as they dance and morph across the screen, but it was actually all done manually—which is even more of an impressive and arduous feat as a piece of animation.

"I took advantage of our tendency to be unoriginal on social media to make this animation." Hiérophante writes on Vimeo. "Everything from image search to editing is made 'by hand' without any automated software. People point out to me that some similar videos already exist so it seems that making a video about clichés is a cliché: good ironic lesson for me to learn!"

There's a kind of pleasing poetic meta-ness to that.

To learn more about the artist [click here](http:// soundcloud.com/hierophante).

h/t Metafilter, Reddit

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