Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
London Wall
Commissioned for the re-launch of the Museum of London in Summer 2010, London Wall comprises over 500 fly-posters, produced by an improvised printing studio, representing social media traffic acquired from Twitter within a three-mile radius of the museum. Installed on a wall in the museum for the duration of the launch show, London Wall acts both as a large-scale visual poem and a performance of its construction. The folio of fly posters has been acquired by the Museum's permanent collection, as it constitutes a socio-historical record, marking an early period of online social networking.
The output is a collaborative project with Jon Thomson (Slade).
Please see portfolio for further documentation of research dimensions.
The use of social data in the production of digital art is a relatively recent phenomenon (Nick Crowe 1999; Thomson & Craighead 1999). However, aside from seminal works such as Listening Post (Hansen and Rubin 2003), little work has explored how these records can be used in public galleries as installation projects. As such, the project asks a number of questions: How can digital artworks develop socio-historical records of urban conversations through the use of social networking data to produce a poetics of the city the work is installed in? How can such work be installed in gallery spaces and what production issues are faced when employing online material? Social media postings made within a specific radius around the museum or gallery were logged and collated. Twitter status updates were then translated into a series of large paper fly-posters printed out in the gallery space and pasted by hand onto the museum wall, as a constantly evolving materialisation of a flow of social information. By using an older but similarly temporary medium (the fly-poster) to display its technological descendant (online social media), the project is able to suggest socio-historical relations between the two. Each performance of this work creates a recording of an ephemeral social history. In doing so, it develops approaches for installing social data-based artworks in public gallery spaces and produces a model of practice for the digital arts that combines analogue, digital and performative processes within the same work.
