Performing Social Media: Artistic Approaches to Analyzing Big Data

Using several performances undertaken as part of a public art residency, this article discusses creative and playful approaches to social media data. Four pieces are discussed to demonstrate how social media posts can be reappropriated and represented. In this project, geotagged Flickr images were used as a foundation for arts performances to give new meanings to the spaces where the social media post was tagged. This demonstrates a way to bridge the quantitative–qualitative divide through the use of geographic big data in art, enabling scholars to move beyond the visualizations of big data produced by GIScience.