Performing social media: artistic approaches to analysing 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 re-appropriated 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. In doing so, it demonstrates a way to bridge the quantitative-qualitative divide through the use of geographic big data in art, enabling scholars to move beyond the visualisations of big data produced by GIScience.