the art of curating art on social media

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Literature review: Assemblage of touch

In the context of smartphone engagement, an important consideration is that in order to become participatory, we may need to physically interact with the phone or tablet. Anne Cranny-Francis (2007) focuses on the issue of ‘touch’ in an arts context. She explains that the current proliferation of touch-based technologies is presenting the user with culturally and socially specific affordances that are ‘seme-ful’ or multiple significant. Touch may evoke a number of meanings such as connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation, positioning which contribute to our understanding of the world and of our own embodied subjectivity (Anne Cranny-Francis 2007). In considering 'assemblage' our haptic engagement is easily incorporated into a habitual condition of which we are not always aware.

Touch, incorporated into the human/machine assemblage offers the smartphone a direct engagement with the social, economic, political and cultural expressions that are delivered on-screen.   Touch, however, also offers a level of inattention to the visible. Paul Frosh (2012,p 172) suggests that through a habitual materialised understanding of smartphone usage, viewers do not always engage with the images. He further suggests that intensity, mode of presentation, mobility and duration can radically alter our sense of the sameness and dissimilarity when viewing images. In the case of social media curating, the emergence of many copies of the same artwork results in their subtle differences becoming obliterated. The value of the image may serve as a way for engaging with the smartphone, rather than for aesthetic purposes.

In the context of 'touch' and online curating, we may consider a continuum ranging from artworks that are untouchable, because they are not easy to find or, to those that are available as a multiplicity, automatically curated, pushed by analytics and 'likes'. The concept of 'duplicity of code' is appropriate, implying an annulation of touching artworks in favour of technologies that may be considered as part of the 'constitutive of remediated regimes of visuality entailing particular subjects and objects of a coded gaze' (Boulton and Zouk, 2013, p 437).


Continue with the final section on the literature review