Conclusions

In this dissertation, I addressed the question ‘What can mobilities research contribute to our understanding of ‘digital assemblages’ in online art spaces?' This main question is framed by three further questions. What exactly can be understood as an ‘assemblage’ in the context of the Mobilities literature? What are the mobility tools contributing to the emergence of digital assemblage in social media art spaces? To what extent can experiencing social media art spaces be considered as a practice of creating assemblages?

Social media curating

From the Mobilities literature, two main concepts are relevant in the context of social media art curating. 
First of all the mobility/mooring concept is a key observation which emerges through the various social media curating practices. This is manifested as part of situating the authored artwork as a constituent element of a crowd sourced repository, associated with a commercial factor that prefers analytic-driven assemblages. The personal curating is embedded in the curating of the crowds.
Secondly, social media art curating can be described as a performance, for which the participatory and sensual engagement through touch ensures that the viewer can be directed to the rhizomatic emergence of the artworks, in a simultaneous offline and online landscape.

What is less clearly emerging from the mobilities literature is how the artworks themselves, in their situated assemblages, are affected by mobility. In particular to what extent is the immateriality of the code affected by the compressing, the reassembling of bits and bytes and how does this affect the aesthetic experience? Nevertheless, the available technological infrastructure pushes the artworks onto a global playing field offering New Media curators unlimited scope for further engagement and new assemblages. Indeed the ‘mooring’ element in social media curating becomes loosely interpreted, an algorithm keeping track, lines of code overtaking the materiality of the organic assemblage.

Navigating social media art spaces is based on touching artworks, which when performed regularly become signifiers for which the original significance, the aesthetic experience, has all but disappeared. Yet the unique performative features of the curatorial assemblages, fed by crowd behaviour reassure a continued interaction, a fleeting aesthetic enjoyment.

The curatorial mix of ArtStack, Pictify and Trover can be seen as an example of what Mackenzie (2006, p. 141) describes when ‘individuals, groups and corporations develop embodied, institutional or commodified forms that feed further imaginings of mobility, ubiquity, portability and affordability.' To illustrate this point, I can observe established museums and galleries sitting alongside the obscure artist, artworks presented in personalised galleries vying for the viewer's attention, curated on the smartphone, instantly accessible and touched, shared and re-uploaded by friends and strangers.

Evaluating the mobility methods

Developing a framework for analysing the various mobility components has been challenging. The ensuing methodological model based on the ethnography and visual analysis, identified three themes – shadowed, situated and temporal.

At times the social semiotic analysis was unable to capture the dynamics, the movement of navigating online spaces, the transient salience of curating artworks. Further development of an interdisciplinary framework is required for describing the ephemeral but persistent conditions of engaging with the online aesthetic experiences.
Büscher et al (2011b) suggest that mobility methods may foster open-ness to uncertainty, situatedness, feedback effects and reflexivity. Rose and Tolia-Kelly (2012) indicated the need to understand the co-constitution of visuality and materiality. In this project I aimed at bringing these features to the front. Further input from New Media literature and New Media arts practice may offer more theoretical grasp in developing the methodological framework, a view supported by Peter Merrimen (2014).

Challenges for the flâneuse

I have demonstrated how the example of curating art and graffiti on social media can be considered a virtual flânerie, as part of assembling a ‘hybrid space’ (Frith, 2012), blending the physical sensation of real world and quotidian experiences into online aesthetic assemblages.

The ambulating and loitering of the 19^th century flâneur (Featherstone 1998, Kramer and Short, 2011) is overtaken by the browsing of social media galleries and the participatory ‘liking’ of digital artefacts and its users.  Baudelaire’s Parisian arcade is recreated virtually through personal social media galleries, each with carefully monitored analytics inducing a reciprocated mode. The flâneur, the secret spectator (Tester, 1994) once observed as being ‘in’ the crowd , has very much become an analytic and public figure,  one ‘of’  the crowd, as expressed by Edgar Alan Poe in the story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ influential on both Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s  concept of flâneur  (Featherstone 1998, Kramer and Short 2011, Tester 1994). 

In addition, ‘flânerie' is ready to abandon the sole perspective of Baudelaire's masculine observer or narrator (Tester 1994, Molz 2011). Similarly, understanding flânerie's feminization due to the proliferation of quasi-public spaces of the shopping malls (Feathersone, 1998) is also a questionable position. For the 21st century, Kramer and Short (2011, p 336) suggest that a 'flânerie regenerates as a sensuous, subjective process, and the examination of this reinvigoration in terms of the flâneuse’s experience is overdue'.

As part of my personal development, the performative walking practice that a flânerie allows can be seen as a method to grasp the ‘everyday aesthetics of participating in the rhythms of quotidian urban space' (Kramer and Short, 2011, p 334). Walking the social media spaces is a chance to intertwine personalised aesthetic observations into emergent assemblages.

Further research
Actor-Network Theory

The concept of 'assemblage' is a dense and creative concept. The Actor-Network Theory (ANT) may offer further intellectual strands. Farias (2010) in this context suggests that ANT as a theoretical and methodological approach to the social sciences shares the Deleuzian framework of multiple enactments. Farias discusses this in the context of urban studies but this may equally be applicable to the study of social media spaces and beyond the curating of art.  The 'heterogeneous connection between objects, spaces, materials, machines, bodies, subjectivities, symbols, formulas  and so on that "assemble" a city' (Farias, 2010, p 14) is equally understood with regards to assembling social media spaces. Farias suggests that cities can be experienced in multiple ways (as tourist, a transport system, a playground, public stage, a consumer market, a surveillance area, a space to socialise, a private memory, a surface for artists....) and so too can the assemblages of social media spaces. 

Flânerie as a mobility method

Social media spaces can be regarded as spaces whereby the distinct boundaries between learning, leisure, research, professional development, business cannot always be maintained. This follows a similar approach to Farias' Urban Studies (2010) in developing multiple understandings and experiences of the city and its heterogeneous mix.
Users very much 'thread' along social media spaces to collect information or new skills. The concept of flânerie as a mobile method could be developed in the context of distance learning. This may complement the research done by Bayne et al (2014) who consider the traditional universities spaces with regards to the enacted spaces of a distance learning environment, research also building on the Mobilities literature and the mobilities/mooring paradigm.

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