The purpose of the ethnography was to observe the creation of visual assemblages and subsequent engagement with regards to social media art curating.
As part of the ethnographic data, I can summarise the following activity:
- I recorded 14 screencasts which I uploaded on a private channel in YouTube. This gave me the opportunity to revisit the recording of my engagement with the social media apps. My activity can be described as authoring (uploading) artefacts as well as ‘following’ a number of users, artists, including artworks by Rothko and collections of street art and graffiti curated by other online users.
- The total time recorded (between Feb 7-18,2014) is 77’42’’ with 5 uploads for ArtStack, 5 for Pictify and 4 for Trover.
- Trover and Artstack have a time-space interface for the personal curatorial space, meaning that the app itself offers a recorded sequence of engagement, with images and times listed. The apps also display avatars of the users engaging with the artworks and any comments that have been made.
- Status updates of any users engaging with my curatorial activity in Trover and ArtStack are delivered to my smartphone and via mailbox. These status updates also include copies of the artworks.
- Written observations of the screencasts were used for the development of the coding categories. These were subjected to a number of refinements for the purpose of building a methodological framework based on the mobility literature. The observations were written in an impressionist style, as described by Owen (2008), following the natural inquiry approach, explained in the section on the rationale for the mixed approach.
My visual ethnography creates a mix with dual purpose, both as researcher, and as practitioner with the appropriation of images considered on multiple levels: as image-making, photo-elicitation and as collage-as-inquiry, the latter more akin to an arts-based research methodology (Prosser and Loxley, 2008) .
Hine
(2000) suggests that researchers should not just be lurking in their online activity, since ethnographic
authority comes from exposing the emergent analysis to challenge through
interaction. This is supported by Kozinets (2012) who favours a participatory
role for the ethnographer. Without experience of the cultural
context, ethnographic interpretation is impaired and the researcher can merely perform
guesswork about cultural meaning. Furthermore, by
taking part online this activity contributes to a reflexive tool that deepens an understanding of the medium (Hine, 2000). For my practice of repeatedly
viewing the data sets, combined with new visits of the social media spaces, I
gained specific mobility experience, in moving around, curating these spaces, interacting
with other users and sharing my uploaded artefacts. The subject of my research
interests and curatorial practice thus became an ‘investigation of the making
and remaking of space through mediated interactions’ (Hine, 2000, p 64).
Rose and Tolia-Kelly (2012) believe that the
relationship between the visual and the material demands for a new kind of
thinking. The authors suggest a methodology which entails ‘the
speculative, the temporal, the spatial, the visual processes of becoming which
requires an understanding of the co-constitution of visuality and materiality’
(Rose and Tolia-Kelly, 2012, p 2). This aligns with the 4 methodologies of Büscher
et al (2011a). Furthermore, collating
graffiti can be considered ‘an intersection between corporeal and virtual
movement’ (Molz, 2011, p 89). In the quest for seeking artworks, curators are
not just physically on the move, but, they are ‘constantly moving around
overlapping, virtual, imaginative, communicative and corporeal spaces of social
interaction’ (Molz, 2011, p 89).
When
uploading images, as part of this project, I contribute to the app, to its code
and the associated online spaces. I add to the galleries, thus affecting the
ranking of other uploads. I therefore contribute via practice, which carries an
element of risk, since my activity is effectively shaping these
online environments.
As part of the methodological implications, an interesting observation can be made with regards to handheld media devices and the notion that the human-technology relation is also a body-tool relation. Ingrid Richardson (2007, p 205) believes that ‘every mobile–body merger invokes certain kinds of being-in-the-world, and particular ways of knowing and making that world’. She suggests that mobile media usage is an ongoing ‘incorporation' that involves certain prosthetic and orthotic capacities of mobile media. This would imply that all social media app users, including researchers, ‘share’ a particular methodology. Richardson's views can be considered against Jiron's shadowing which offered a partial understanding.
Christine Hine (2000, p 58) suggests that as researchers ‘we are not studying distinctive different culture but an assemblage of existing ones’[my italics]. I would like to suggest that social media technology creates a fuzzy boundary between the various roles we play, as researcher, user/consumer and producer.
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Christine Hine (2000, p 58) suggests that as researchers ‘we are not studying distinctive different culture but an assemblage of existing ones’[my italics]. I would like to suggest that social media technology creates a fuzzy boundary between the various roles we play, as researcher, user/consumer and producer.
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