From Art Images to Instagram Content: Modes of Image Actualization and Genre Configurations in Muklay’s Visual Practice

On Instagram, artworks circulate as images configured as records of artistic production, markers of identity, commodities, experiences of events, and resources for user interaction. This study identifies modes of art-image actualization and examines how their relational arrangements contribute to genre configurations in Muklay’s Instagram practice. It adopts a qualitative approach combining virtual ethnography, visual content analysis, and relational interpretation informed by the concept of machinic assemblage. Nine selected posts (2023–2025) are examined at the levels of individual scenes and complete posts, with prosumer documentation providing supplementary contextual evidence. The findings identify six potentially overlapping modes: Artwork Image, Process Image, Lifestyle Image, Commodity Image, Event Image, and Social Image. Cross-case comparisons demonstrate how similar image modes participate in different genre configurations. Documentation of artistic processes, for example, may foreground creative labor or support branded communication, while artworks situated in domestic and exhibition settings acquire distinct narrative and communicative functions. These configurations emerge through relations among artistic activities, material objects, bodies, audiovisual conventions, and platform affordances rather than through image types or technical formats alone. The study proposes a relational image–function–genre framework that explains how art images are organized into Instagram content, with its conclusions limited to the documented cases.