A year ago, UNESCO designated York with City of Media Arts status, and immediately a minor storm erupted in the Yorkshire twittersphere.
Jubilation, bafflement, scorn – York’s social media conversation had never been so lively, and one year later the the subject remains as divisive as ever.
According To McGee, Tower Street, York
Until Tues Nov 10
It’s a development that caught the attention of gallery owner Greg McGee who saw the online battle as fertile ground for an exhibition in his white cube gallery, According to McGee, opposite Clifford’s Tower.
Via the gallery’s charitable arm, New Visuality, Greg worked on collating the diverse opinions.
He then sourced design agencies to compose from the Tweets collectible giclee posters now exhibited as Text: Technology, Disability, and Art.
The show launched last week to coincide with Illuminating York and will continue until Tuesday, November 10.
Funded by Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts, Text uses the posters of Tweets collected by Greg as a platform to explore opinions, inclusivity, and digital innovation.
Greg said:
Luckily we’ve got design agency Choir of Vision on board, and so the posters of the Tweets can hang just as beautifully as the letterpress posters provided by Shipley’s Print Project.
Light artist Nick Walters is ensuring that when they’re projected through our front window onto Tower Street, all Tweets and slogans look unified and world class.
It’s been an extremely gratifying project.
Opinionated vim
Three of the posters
The posters themselves have lost none of their opinionated vim. They are based on Tweets by York people including @Sinjy:
Isn't @CityOfMediaArts just another quango? Must get confusing what logo to put on top of meeting agenda? http://t.co/2T2Fex8ECS
— David Dixon (@Sinjy) October 6, 2015
@colinhall194 Tweeted:
York's pub funded arts run by unaccountbl elite eg @YorkTheatre @YorkMuseumTrust @York_Today @GSwinburn @according2mcgee @CityOfMediaArts
— Colin Hall (@colinhall194) October 6, 2015
@GSwinburn said:
For the record @according2mcgee I don't know if @CityOfMediaArts is doing a cracking job with our ?£100k taxes-perhaps that's part of prob?
— Gwen Swinburn (@GSwinburn) October 6, 2015
Three more posters
And in the opposite corner, @York_Today said:
@GSwinburn @according2mcgee @CityOfMediaArts It is a cracking opportunity for the City and I hope we succeed in promoting the Arts.
— York Today (@York_Today) October 6, 2015
And @Mat_LB had:
@according2mcgee a mandate for positive, radical, creative change in the City, reimagining our unique heritage in extraordinary ways
— Mat Lazenby (@Mat_LB) October 6, 2015
It is a sparky dialogue, and Greg is pleased to see the posters sell to people keen to purchase a little piece of York’s contemporary history.
“The posters themselves are beautiful, and their polemic nature has a certain energy, but I also think that Tweets are fascinating items in themselves,” he said.
But they’re in the public arena, and when you get a batch of Tweets focused on York as a City of Media Arts it makes perfect sense for a contemporary art gallery to bottle them and exhibit them as curiosities.
Greg said one of their collectors came to York especially for Illuminating York and thought the posters were the perfect souvenir to reflect what she saw as York’s current status.
Due to the display’s popularity, the Tweet posters will continue for another week. Greg is looking forward to revisiting the conversation with a similar New Visuality exhibition next year.
And his own opinion? The City Of Media Arts designation is “the most exciting development in York for decades”.