Ode to an Orange on Instagram

View project HERE: https://www.instagram.com/naomi_the_orange/ 

After the text from "Ode to an Orange," I thought about how the text is all about someone's experience with oranges. He engages with the orange, notices everything about its shape, size color, lifespan, and all of the emotions that come with it. The text was an in-depth look on an orange, but I thought it would be interesting if we looked at the world from the perspective of the orange itself. What might the orange notice that we didn't? What might it notice or discover? Would it come to conclusions that I didn't?

I also thought that Woiwode's text created an incredibly beautiful image of an orange, using all five senses and allowing the image of the orange to come alive in my mind. To me, instagram is also a place of beautiful images. Through the use of filters, angles, and captions, people present a beautiful, sometimes unrealistic picture of themselves. So I decided to set up an instagram account for an orange. This would allow the orange to not only express its thoughts about the world, but also would allow me to try and capture the beauty of the orange by creating beautiful images. Woiwode's images all came through text; I would cry to create beautiful images with pictures. I was excited to try this because although I have an instagram, I usually don't spend a great deal of time on filters, and I thought it would be fun to see what an orange's idea of beauty would look like. 

This idea was also partly inspired by the instagram page "Karl the Fog." (View here: https://www.instagram.com/karlthefog/) A few years ago, someone made an instagram account for the San Francisco fog. It had a name and a personality, and allowed people to feel as if the fog were a real person. It would use terms such as "I ate San Francisco this morning" or "Sunny days are the worst." I wanted to see what an orange would think of the world in the same way the fog would. 

Working on this project, I was surprised just how long I would spend on each of the posts: Taking the picture, choosing the filter, thinking of a caption. This taught me that beautiful pictures are not easy to come by, just as I'm sure it was not easy for Woiwode to come up with all the beautiful imagery he did. It takes work and practice. In looking at the world from the perspective of an orange, who I named Naomi, I decided that everything would be big and exciting and new. She was out of her native Orange County home and so she found things exciting that I normally wouldn't, like driving in a car. I also followed several other pages on instagram, all that had to do with fruit and oranges, (like Real Housewives of Orange County and Fruit of the Loom) because I decided that's what would most interest her. I had a ton of fun with this project. It allowed me to be creative and experience the world through one of our modern technologies, instagram, but from an entirely new, and altogether strange an unexpected perspective: an orange.