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“Nuit Blanche and Transformational Publics”

Scotiabank Nuit Blanche City Hall 2009

I stumbled on this feature article on our SSHRC funded, social media creative research project. In 2010, Faisal Anwar and I began our investigation of how people were using Twitter as a wayfinding tool during Toronto’s all night arts event, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. 

We built a Tweet analytic tool, archived tweets tagged with event specific hashtags (#NuitBlancheTO, #snbTO …), and ran searches based on event and installation names, that mapped people flows through the event’s various zones. 

Over three years, our research expanded to content shared via flickr, YouTube, and Instagram, revealing a communal psychogeography generated over multiple platforms during the 12 hour event and after. 

Presentation on +City / Nuit Blanche and Transformational Publics, 2012.

Working with research assistants, we often found specific moments captured by multiple individuals, offering a proto-photosynth data set that could be restitched, roughly, for a loose, sometimes 360 degree public documentary. 

Presentation on +City / Nuit Blanche and Transformational Publics, 2012.

As I wrote then in an essay published in Public (2012), edited by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, “These exchanges make visible the fluid actualization and processual experience of participatory, emergent public(s) that accord with how Michael Warner defines a ‘public’: that it is self-organizing, involves a relation amongst strangers, is simultaneously personal and impersonal in address, is constituted only through attention, and provides a discursive public space.“

In addition, we discovered that striking groups of participants would appear over the night in disparate photos and videos, as they traversed Nuit Blanche installations. One year in particular, it was a group of young people wearing oversized mustaches. Another year it was an indie band in costume, playing through the streets.

Presentation on +City / Nuit Blanche and Transformational Publics, 2012.

What I realized very quickly was the depth and scale of information we had available as to individual’s movements and activities, and the potential infringement of individual privacy. The question of privacy in the digital public sphere, however, was complicated by, #1 Twitter’s mandate to share widely, and #2 the use of hashtags which explicitly tag tweets as meant for a wider conversation and viewing by strangers. 

+City data visualization tool tracking #mit8 hashtag during the MIT: public media, private media 2008 Conference, MIT Cambridge MA.

My concerns with data privacy started here. Even with our tool in beta, the data aggregation from Twitter coupled with content analysis on other social media sharing platforms, all public, all accessible, made the outlines of the surveillance state visible.

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+City Twitter Data Visualization Project Featured on SSHRC Home Page

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My collaborator, Faisal Anwar, & I were delighted to see our +City research/creation data visualization project featured on the SSHRC home page with a very short interview:

Where social media and ‘real life’ intersect, crucial questions emerge

Ontario researcher Siobhan O’Flynn started out with a seemingly straightforward question: how do people use Twitter to navigate large‑scale cultural events like Toronto’s Nuit Blanche? Digging in, however, the University of Toronto lecturer and her team unearthed issues of copyright, ethics and privacy that could have a profound impact on how journalists, academics and governments handle social media data.

“The information individuals make available without questioning the consequences is astonishing,” she observes. “It is available for data mining to marketers for a fee—and now, as we are well aware, to intelligence agencies as well. There are vital questions we need to answer here going forward.”

O’Flynn was originally curious to learn if insights into social media use during live events in specific locations might contribute to better urban planning—specifically, the creation of spaces that foster positive social outcomes.

“We wanted to know whether social media exchanges affect people’s real‑world actions and experiences,” she says, “and how that might inform urban planning and event design.”

The current project the SSHRC post refers to has a fuller description on our pluscity.me website:

In +City’s latest DV work ‘Public/Private – Playing in the Digital Sphere,’ +City’s research and practice investigates the troubled & unstable grey zone of how Twitter content in the digital public realm changes from public to private, depending on the context of use and the question and often, point of access. As a series of ongoing, interrelated projects, our research now asks: what does it mean to make ‘art’ with content pulled from the digital public realm, especially when Twitter users often list personal details (location, occupation, etc) on their pages? & profiles pics are just as likely to be head shots as custom avatars? What is/should be the borderline between the public & private digital spheres? What are the implications of data mining & the commercialization of digital content in the era of big data? What does it mean to resurrect archived content in a public interactive context? And to be able to search with twitter hashtag streams in real time?