24 Hours of Vine: Big Data and Social Performance

24h Social is a generative a data-driven generative video installation that explores the social media phenomenon of Vine video as performances in data. The project is created from a database of appropriated Vine content, extracted from millions of tweets, with each video shown at the time of its original creation. The project simultaneously celebrates Vine as a platform that facilitates succinct creative performative expressions whilst acknowledging that these activities are embedded within a problematic data assemblage that accrues substantial quantities of data on its users. Drawing on notions of social media performance it is suggested that a pathway to understanding the complex interplay of platform affordances and user performance in Vine is through a treatment of Vines as performances in data. The Vine database is identified as a resource for revealing new insights into everyday life at multiple levels and not solely a corporate or governmental intelligence asset used to serve targeted advertising or profile populations. This paper proposes that activist art practice has a part to play in making visible the structures and practices of data capture thus opening them to scrutiny using 24h Social as a case study.