We use publicly available embedded GPS information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world. Each of these photographs is taken on the site of the update and paired with the originating text. Our act of making a photograph anchors and memorializes the ephemeral online data in the real world and also probes the expectations of privacy surrounding social networks.

Twitter estimates there are over 550 million tweets daily, creating a new level of digital noise. Clive Thompson uses the term ambient awareness to describe this incessant online contact in the New York Times Magazine article, “Brave NewWorld of Digital Intimacy.” According to Thompson, “It is. . . very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.” Our collaborative work is a means for situating this virtual communication in the physical realm. We imagine ourselves as virtual flâneurs, ethnographers of the Internet, exploring cities 140 characters at a time through the lives of others.

With gratitude, we wish to acknowledge those curators and artistic colleagues that made site-specific iterations of the project possible: Amy J. Ash, Sam Barzilay, Louise Clements, Jacqueline Collomb, Gillian Dykeman, Hannah Frieser, Tara Gladden, John D. Freyer, Meghan Kirkwood, Jacqueline Maria Milad, Amy Miller, Julia Muney Moore, Elizabeth Kauffman, Michael David Murphy, Christopher Rauschenberg, Laura Roumanos, Marisa Sage, Dave Shelley, and Lisa Soccio.

The following institutions were instrumental in the making of the photographs: Atlanta Celebrates Photography, the Contemporary Art Purchasing Program at the University of Maryland, the DUMBO Improvement District, Derby QUAD, FORMAT International Photography Festival, the Indianapolis Airport Authority, Light Work, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Salisbury University Art Galleries, Third Space Gallery, United Photo Industries, and the Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts at College of the Desert.