Art project links Twitter and users' Geolocation

Lamar Dodd School of Art photography lecturer Marni Shindelman has an interesting new art project that has re-introduced art to social media:

An exhibition of the project, “Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream,” opened on Thursday at United Photo Industries in New York and runs through Jan. 28.

Ms. Shindelman called Twitter “a huge, vast sea of digital noise.”

“But it’s important that it exists,” she said, “and I think our work shows this. There are singular people posting things, not just millions and millions of tweets a day. They actually exist somewhere.”

The two artists see themselves as archivists and their project as a homage to the Twitter users whose posts they use. The statements are pithy — as they must be on Twitter — but often evocative, moving, even wise. Paired alongside the images, each one becomes poetic.

“Somebody felt this here and this is what it looked like,” Mr. Larson said. “These are the nuances that might have influenced what they felt.”

The pair, who live in different cities, met at a photo conference in 2007. Ms. Shindelman had been exploring Internet myths, while Mr. Larson had been looking into storytelling. They corresponded for a while (she from Rochester, he from Baltimore) and eventually decided to do a photo project about telepathy. “Then we started getting into social media as a way of getting to know what someone else is thinking,” Mr. Larson said.

Congratulations to both on this terrific project, news of which has been bouncing around the internet at terrific speeds. In addition to the New York Times Lens blog above, Geolocation has been written about, so far, at Wired, Business Insider, Yahoo! Canada, Gizmodo, The Verge, Fast to Create, Andrew Sullivan, PetaPixel, Wired Italian, Beautiful Decay and Animal New York. And that's probably just today.

Image: From Geolocation