Riot Smoke: A Mosaic of Social Media Images

“Riot Smoke” is a composited image that represents the immense and unwieldy social media activity from 2011 to 2012. It is one in a series of mosaics made up of profile thumbnails from the top thousand Twitter users contributing posts and Flickr photos to imitate popular memes. The singularity of this image stands for an infinite number of visual memories, some recorded, most not. The use of the mosaic mode of “assemblage” is intended to capture this notion of the infinite, reiterative algorithmic form of any single visual expression. These mosaics reveal a secret world of code in an abstract, algorithmic aesthetic, blown up and situated in and out of time. The mosaic images are not literal representations of this body of text; they are a stand in, a metonym for it. Thus, the aesthetics of the work I am proposing also trace back to choices made while creating the archive—understanding not only the text within the archive, but that the archive itself is a text is also imperative.