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Installation Requirements / Space
24hour Social is a three channel generative installation showing two video channels and one streaming meta-data channel
Descriptions & Essays
Conor McGarrigle 06-10-2017
24hour Social is a data-driven 24 hour generative video installation that questions how
identities are constructed as data in an era of social media that act as authentic
platforms for performances of the self and simultaneously as systems of data-
collection and commodification. This project focuses on Vine, Twitter’s recently closed six second video sharing platform, appropriating two full days of data to mark 24 hours as social media
performance in all its richness.
Vine videos are engaging, creative, funny and often anarchic. In a very real sense they echo the creative energy of the early DIY Internet, framing the web as a space for individual creation. Yet, despite this, Vine is in essence a data collection platform designed to collect and sell data on its users. This project examines the tension between these opposing aspects of the platform through
rendering both visible; the creative impulse that fueled Vine’s 5 videos per second and the vast accumulation of data that has become a ubiquitous part of our network society.
Vine explicitly set out to hold a mirror to the everyday, describing Vines as "little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life". 24hour Social presents a portrait of Vine as a social-media-fueled Man with a Movie Camera, capturing the unfolding day across the Internet. However, this video content is simultaneously seen as data with this view inculcated into the algorithmic methods of its curation into this work. The video installation is generated from the Vine database showing not only the videos artifacts but the thick metadata descriptions that describe each and every one as data. The data was collected without permission from Vine’s public servers using open techniques that have been developed by activists to even the balance through watching the watchers.
The project works from a database of in excess of 250,000 videos and plays a video
for each second of two full days on Vine.. Each video is algorithmically synced to play at the time of its original creation and once played remains on-screen to be over-layered by subsequent videos building up a rich, multi-layered and kinetic screen reflecting the complexity and always-on nature of Vine's torrent of video data.
24hour Social approaches Vine as a social media service where the creative
expressions of its users are performances in data. It seeks to critique and unravel the entanglements of a platform that affords genuine creative and innovative expressions which are then commodified as a data- product. This is achieved through capturing a
day of this data and re-commodifying it as an artwork, an act which knowingly appropriates the creativity of the platform's users.
24h Social seeks to reflect on this central dilemma of our networked society;; the desire to engage with ubiquitous networked platforms that facilitate creativity and
sociality in a myriad ways
Conor McGarrigle: 24hour Social, 06-10-2017, in: Archive of Digital Art 24hour Social is a data-driven 24 hour generative video installation that questions how
identities are constructed as data in an era of social media that act as authentic
platforms for performances of the self and simultaneously as systems of data-
collection and commodification. This project focuses on Vine, Twitter’s recently closed six second video sharing platform, appropriating two full days of data to mark 24 hours as social media
performance in all its richness.
Vine videos are engaging, creative, funny and often anarchic. In a very real sense they echo the creative energy of the early DIY Internet, framing the web as a space for individual creation. Yet, despite this, Vine is in essence a data collection platform designed to collect and sell data on its users. This project examines the tension between these opposing aspects of the platform through
rendering both visible; the creative impulse that fueled Vine’s 5 videos per second and the vast accumulation of data that has become a ubiquitous part of our network society.
Vine explicitly set out to hold a mirror to the everyday, describing Vines as "little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life". 24hour Social presents a portrait of Vine as a social-media-fueled Man with a Movie Camera, capturing the unfolding day across the Internet. However, this video content is simultaneously seen as data with this view inculcated into the algorithmic methods of its curation into this work. The video installation is generated from the Vine database showing not only the videos artifacts but the thick metadata descriptions that describe each and every one as data. The data was collected without permission from Vine’s public servers using open techniques that have been developed by activists to even the balance through watching the watchers.
The project works from a database of in excess of 250,000 videos and plays a video
for each second of two full days on Vine.. Each video is algorithmically synced to play at the time of its original creation and once played remains on-screen to be over-layered by subsequent videos building up a rich, multi-layered and kinetic screen reflecting the complexity and always-on nature of Vine's torrent of video data.
24hour Social approaches Vine as a social media service where the creative
expressions of its users are performances in data. It seeks to critique and unravel the entanglements of a platform that affords genuine creative and innovative expressions which are then commodified as a data- product. This is achieved through capturing a
day of this data and re-commodifying it as an artwork, an act which knowingly appropriates the creativity of the platform's users.
24h Social seeks to reflect on this central dilemma of our networked society;; the desire to engage with ubiquitous networked platforms that facilitate creativity and
sociality in a myriad ways
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