Social media has leveled the playing field for artists. Suddenly, indie artists have a platform to showcase what they can do and connect directly with their audiences.
On Saturday, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington will host a symposium on the intersection of art and social media.
Nate Larson, a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a photographer who recently made news with his images of the unrest in Baltimore, is the event's moderator.
Larson is involved in several art projects involving social media. His most recent work “GEOLOCATION,” with fellow artist Marni Shindelman, uses publicly available GPS metadata in Twitter posts to track tweets. Photographs are then created for a public art installation. Larson says online interaction is mostly positive but warns that users can become too attached to their devices.
“I think it's so easy to become normalized,” he says. “Somebody's profiting from all this data and Facebook is free because they mine that data and they’re able to use it to sell to advertisers, so we hope that people start to think about how that behavior became so normalized and why we feel the need to share so much.”
Larson’s photographs, taken the day after the unrest in Baltimore were recently picked up by national news outlets including CNN. The photos were first shared on social media and Larson admits he was initially apprehensive about sharing the work with the mass media which he believes sensationalized their Baltimore coverage.
“But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if that is the channel that is most visible and I can get my photographs on to that platform, perhaps it can help shift the tenor of the coverage,” he says. “I hope on some level it’s a subversive activity and that by allowing mainstream media to put my images out there, it can somehow shift that larger conversation and the kinds of images that are being seen.”
The symposium, “How May I Help You, Human? Social Robotics in the Digital Age,” will be held on Saturday, May 9, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., in the DCCA's Wings Foundation Auditorium.
http://www.natelarson.com