In our decade-long project, Geolocation, we use publicly available GPS information embedded in social media to track the location of user posts and then travel to the location to create a photograph that both marks the physical place and reacts to the content of the original post. Our act of making a photograph anchors and memorializes the ephemeral online data in the real world and probes the expectations of privacy surrounding social networks.

For this site-specific iteration of the project, #Mobilize, we added to the bigger body of work by drawing from trending hashtags in Rochester, New York, to identify social justice themes relevant to the community. This new work furthers our examination of how social media and smartphones have contributed to a new era of social justice, including citizen journalism, information sharing, and community protest by exploring themes of racial discrimination, violence, right to protest, gun violence, police relations, political activism, and other social concerns. The resulting images function as a social document of this moment in American history and lift up the voices of those fighting for justice with these new digital tools.

This body of work was made at the invitation of the George Eastman Museum for a solo exhibition open from January 25 – May 26, 2019. We were artists-in-residence in Rochester during the summer of 2018 to make the photographs and also to collaborate with a group of teenagers at the Out Alliance.

We are eternally grateful to curator Jamie Allen for her sage counsel in all aspects of the project and exhibition. We are additionally grateful to Lisa Hostetler and the full team at the George Eastman Museum for their steadfast support.