the art of curating art on social media

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Methodology: overview

In this project I align key concepts of mobilities literature with the practice of curating art in social media spaces. The social media apps I selected are Trover, a tourist app, and two apps for curating art, ArtStack and Pictify.

I decided in the first instance to perform an ethnography for these sites which developed my expertise of what it means to be moving in a virtual space, as part of curating artworks. A subsequent visual analysis of screen dumps and screencasts allowed for a systematic refinement of a theoretical model which informed the concept of assemblages. The ethnographic method further illustrated that flânerie can be seen as a mobility practice in an online context.

All activities were performed with the two research questions in mind:
  1. What are the mobility tools contributing to the emergence of digital assemblage in social media art spaces?
  2. To what extent can experiencing social media art spaces be considered as a practice of creating assemblages?
The questions inform the practice of moving around social media art spaces. They also answer what it means to visit, locate, collect or pin the artworks, which can be understood in the context of ‘mooring’. Thus my experience also reflects the discussions in the literature review on the mobility/mooring dialectic which is a feature of the ‘Mobilities Paradigm’.

One key aspect of this project has been to appropriate some of the mobility methods that were described in the literature.  Büscher et al (2011a) list 12 different methodologies. This project used a combination of mobility methods  illustrating a ‘co-present immersion’ (Büscher et al, 2011a, p 9) of an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience is the underlying mood for this research and is manifested through the regular online curating of artworks. Aesthetics can also be considered as a 'philosophical approach for inquiry of all kinds, striving for connections between and among disciplines, demanding continuous engagement in reflection and deliberation, and honoring all forms of inquiry as complex, creative and developmental in nature' (Bresler and Latta, 2008, p 12). Based on this observation the aesthetic experience may be considered a qualitative research method, aligning with the methods that are identified by Büscher et al, 2011a, as follows: [1]

1. Observing the pattern of movement of objects (artefacts) on various social media spaces.
This ethnographic practice offered the opportunity to follow the artefacts on the various social media spaces, and how their engagement allows for their appearance on various curatorial spaces. In this process digital assemblages were created.

In her article ‘On becoming ‘la sombra’ / the shadow’ Paola Jirón (2011) explains her mobility practice of shadowing her subjects. This method is grounded in a phenomenological perspective, an approach that accepts that the totality of ‘the experience’ can never be fully apprehended by the researcher. As a researcher one can never quite understand how the experience of being in mobility takes place, as this will always be partial, incomplete, in process, becoming. (Paola Jirón, 2011, p 36). To have a better understanding, Jirón suggests a reflexive and intersubjective process which involves reassessing methods as experiences become unveiled, accepting one’s positions and experience as part of understanding the other’s and situating the experience in a broader context. I adopted this technique, through moving with the artefacts within their social media platforms in order to have a deeper understanding of the platforms’ temporal and spatial manifestations.

2. The time-space diary
The time-space diary is an automatic recording feature in the social media apps through notifications delivered on the smartphone. Users receive a statistical update on activity. Accessing the apps on phone or laptop gives a complete synchronous overview of the curatorial status, even whilst on the move. This method offers data on personal use and the use by other social media authors. It was the evaluation of this method which informed the lack of data available for an ethnographic study and the incorporation of a visual analysis of screen dumps was taken.

3. Mobile positioning methods
This method is only available on Trover and allows users to pin images onto a Google map. This feature adds a sense of real-life location and can be considered a mobility tool. It also illustrates the mobility/mooring dialectic as outlined in the literature review.

4. Capturing the ‘atmosphere’ of the interface.
The screencasts and screen dumps informed the visual analysis. For this purpose social semiotics was used as a framework for the analysis. 

The above methods took into account the research questions concerned with identifying the mobility tools and the creation of social media assemblages.

The nature of the virtual ethnography aligns with the practice of how mobile phone users are engaging and interacting with social media platforms and what has been described in the context of a ‘Mobilities Turn’.  Researchers benefit ‘if they capture, track, simulate, mimic and shadow the many and interdependent forms of intermittent movement of people, images, information and objects. (Büscher  et  al, 2011a, p 7).’  
The result of adopting this methodology gave an experimental nature to the approach which allowed me taking into account elements of uncertainty, situatedness, feedback effects and reflexivity.It also allowed me knitting ‘together the different material, technical, social, temporal and spatial scales in which everyday interactions take effect’ (Büscher et al, 2011b, p 121).

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[1) respectively referring to methods 2, 4, 7 and 8 of Büscher et al, 2011a, pp. 8-13)