Output details

#CitizenCurators: An Archive of London 2012

#CitizenCurators is an exhibition demonstrating the way that Twitter was used by residents of London to record their impressions of life in the capital during the fortnight of the Olympic Games. Seven thousand Tweets were collected as raw data towards a museological research project in collaboration with the Museum of London; these were accessioned as an ‘object’ of contemporary history for their permanent collection. For The Photographers’ Gallery exhibition, Ride drew upon the historical archive and created a curated exhibition of approximately 900 tweets presented as an evolving sequence, shown as a live internet stream combining photographs and text. The exhibition consists of a live internet artwork that uses bespoke complex computer programming to animate an archive that simulates a Twitter feed of 2012. The content was curated into a coherent narrative for exhibition by structurally using Twitter threads to tell the story of Londoners’ response to the Olympics, as a two-hour durational artwork, on a constant loop. The work was shown on The Wall exhibition space of The Photographers' Gallery – a ‘giant’, digital LCD screen exhibition surface. The Wall is dedicated to the exploration of the digital image and the photograph in networked culture under the curatorship of the Digital Curator, Katrina Sluis, in conjunction with the programming committee of the gallery.

Please see portfolio for documentation of research dimensions.

#CitizenCurators was created as a time-specific exhibition for The Photographers' Gallery for the 2013 anniversary of the London Olympics, to reflect on questions about legacy and social impact, and to examine how social media played an important part in the way that Londoners communicated during 2012. The Gallery also invited the project to accompany an historical exhibition on Mass Observation (founded 1937), as it demonstrated how digital platforms enable new approaches to recording social history through the exchange of images. Research questions were: Can an exhibition demonstrate how Twitter can be used to document Londoners’ experience of the Olympics? How can an art project use 'crowdsourcing' principles to gather material contributed by multiple participants? Can a social media exhibition demonstrate a new approach to using photography in participatory social projects? Can a gallery-based photography exhibition be developed from a museum collecting project? The project originates from research Ride conducted with the Museum of London in 2012 to create an archive that recorded Londoners’ experience of the Olympics, using ‘crowdsourcing’. This was exhibited at MoL (May – October 2012). The Photographers’ Gallery show demonstrates how gallery exhibitions can work collaboratively with a museum-collecting project. #CitizenCurators expands upon social network theory (Kadushin 2011) by providing visual evidence that the networked photographic image is intrinsically linked with cumulative text exchanges (Lister 2008), thus contributing to the discourse on photography in the digital public realm (Lister 2013). The project examines the contemporary importance of crowdsourcing (Brabham 2013) and explores how it can be developed as a fresh approach to curating participatory projects that deal with social events (Deller 2007; Atkins 2011). The project showed that tweets can be presented in a critical context, alongside other social documentary practices, to demonstrate new forms of cultural participation through photography.