An Xiao Mina using French artist Alexander Oudin’s Facebook profile hack on her profile page.Here’s a quick reference guide that will seek to explain the trends, terms, and movements of the brave new media world of art and technology. So you can skim, digest, and be a pseudo-expert next time you’re cornered at a Speed Show exhibition in your local cybercafe. Because, hey, life is short and art long. This week: Social media art.So, what is social media art?
An emerging genre that’s experimental in practice and results that makes use of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or whatever the social network du jour may be. An Xiao Mina, one of the medium’s most well-known practitioners and advocates, tentatively used 4 rules to broadly define it: 1) the web is used for marketing, sourcing, and expressing the art. 2) The audience is involved, hence the name social, yeah? 3) The art is conceptually wealthy but open to those beyond the confines of the art world. 4) It’s adaptable to other platforms, and so is all about the artist’s intent.However, as an infant art form, definitions are still evolving and opinions are welcome.Where did it come from?
People have always admired, ruminated over, and distributed art—ever since those caves were painted—and with the advent of social media and the rise of social network heavyweights like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the world now has access to digital platforms to view art (as well as a whole load of cat videos). The net had already been used as a platform for creating and distributing art by the net.art pioneers, with its video game performance art and websites as artworks, which set a precedent for what was to come. Then when Twitter and Facebook pulled a coup d’état on the internet, in the late aughts, the Brooklyn Museum started 1stfans, “a socially networked museum membership,” launching a Twitter Art Feed project in January 2009. Each month, the feed would feature different artists tweeting in Morse code, from their shower, giving commentary on their fave YouTube clips, and other curatorial and performance-based interactions. With this and other interventions by artists, social networks started being used not just as a place to discuss and distribute, but also as a means of creating art. The Twitter Art Feed is now defunct, but you can find the full archive here. For a more detailed history of social media art, read An Xiao’s in-depth three part account on Hyperallergic here.This week you're really digging…
Creative Time Tweets from non-profit art organisation Creative Time. Inspired by artist Man Bartlett, who used hashtag #BestNonBuy for a performance endurance piece called 24h Best non-Buy where he spent twenty four straight hours in the Manhattan Union Square Best Buy, but didn’t buy a thing. The Creative Time project is a series of three Twitter-based performance pieces, of which Bartlett’s was the first. Next up is David Horvitz (@davidhorvitz), who will create hard copies of every tweet sent using hashtag #5992 between June 17 and June 23. He’ll then transcribe and submit them to the Library of Congress by following the route of the first transcontinental telegram, which Twitter is an descendent of.Nano talk
As a platform, it means art works and performances are now accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, in real-time. But as a means of creating art, pieces become participatory, curatorial, social, and performance-based. People engage with the art—the performer, the audience, and the work become one. The artist is the genesis, the instigator, and the art work then sets off on its journey into an uncertain collaborative future.Describe yourself as…
Creating a cultural dialogue in 140 characters or less.Keywords
Social, tweet, retweet, interactive, twitterverse, update, post, transmit, public, stream.Difficulty level
Viral.Tagline
Brevity is the soul of the artist as microblogger.To recap: Participatory public cyberart.
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An emerging genre that’s experimental in practice and results that makes use of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or whatever the social network du jour may be. An Xiao Mina, one of the medium’s most well-known practitioners and advocates, tentatively used 4 rules to broadly define it: 1) the web is used for marketing, sourcing, and expressing the art. 2) The audience is involved, hence the name social, yeah? 3) The art is conceptually wealthy but open to those beyond the confines of the art world. 4) It’s adaptable to other platforms, and so is all about the artist’s intent.However, as an infant art form, definitions are still evolving and opinions are welcome.Where did it come from?
People have always admired, ruminated over, and distributed art—ever since those caves were painted—and with the advent of social media and the rise of social network heavyweights like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the world now has access to digital platforms to view art (as well as a whole load of cat videos). The net had already been used as a platform for creating and distributing art by the net.art pioneers, with its video game performance art and websites as artworks, which set a precedent for what was to come. Then when Twitter and Facebook pulled a coup d’état on the internet, in the late aughts, the Brooklyn Museum started 1stfans, “a socially networked museum membership,” launching a Twitter Art Feed project in January 2009. Each month, the feed would feature different artists tweeting in Morse code, from their shower, giving commentary on their fave YouTube clips, and other curatorial and performance-based interactions. With this and other interventions by artists, social networks started being used not just as a place to discuss and distribute, but also as a means of creating art. The Twitter Art Feed is now defunct, but you can find the full archive here. For a more detailed history of social media art, read An Xiao’s in-depth three part account on Hyperallergic here.
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Creative Time Tweets from non-profit art organisation Creative Time. Inspired by artist Man Bartlett, who used hashtag #BestNonBuy for a performance endurance piece called 24h Best non-Buy where he spent twenty four straight hours in the Manhattan Union Square Best Buy, but didn’t buy a thing. The Creative Time project is a series of three Twitter-based performance pieces, of which Bartlett’s was the first. Next up is David Horvitz (@davidhorvitz), who will create hard copies of every tweet sent using hashtag #5992 between June 17 and June 23. He’ll then transcribe and submit them to the Library of Congress by following the route of the first transcontinental telegram, which Twitter is an descendent of.Nano talk
As a platform, it means art works and performances are now accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, in real-time. But as a means of creating art, pieces become participatory, curatorial, social, and performance-based. People engage with the art—the performer, the audience, and the work become one. The artist is the genesis, the instigator, and the art work then sets off on its journey into an uncertain collaborative future.Describe yourself as…
Creating a cultural dialogue in 140 characters or less.Keywords
Social, tweet, retweet, interactive, twitterverse, update, post, transmit, public, stream.Difficulty level
hashtag
Age rangeViral.Tagline
Brevity is the soul of the artist as microblogger.To recap: Participatory public cyberart.