Occupy Occupy: What is the potential of digital public space as a medium?

Experimental coding, Research | 2015 My degree project at Central Saint Martins, #OccupyOccupy, is an online movement that critiques the extension of the Occupy movement on social media. The outcome is a Twitter archive of Occupy during #OccupyGezi protest. Tweets on the map are clustered around symbolic spaces of related protests. The aim is to create a context for a political movement in relation to the global Occupy network. While doing that, the map facilitates archive of social media as a form of protest. #OccupyOccupy also occupies Google Maps with Occupy material. #OccupyOccupy aims to translate an offline/physical protest into online/digital means. The final outcome is a Twitter archive of Occupy during #OccupyGezi protest. Tweets on the map are clustered around symbolic spaces of related protests. The aim is to create a context for a political movement in relation to the global Occupy network. While doing that, the map facilitates archive of social media as a form of protest. #OccupyOccupy also occupies Google Maps with Occupy material. The search for a relevant medium for #OccupyOccupy has led me to explore Google Maps. I quickly moved from tackling the default features of this tool into programming a custom Occupy map. I didn’t have any experience in coding prior to that and used free online tools to teach myself HTML and JavaScript. The end result is quite messy and adhoc, much like the way Occupy utilised its own tools. The title of my dissertation is “Learning from #Gezi: What is the potential of #digital #publicspace as a medium?”, which I have written with repeated hashtags. I tweeted my dissertation sentence by sentence on my personal Twitter account. The idea was to bring the dissertation out of the academic purposes and start a real conversation on social media about the issues I was addressing. #OccupyOccupy comes with a stencil kit, consisting of 3 stencils each, with symbols and phrases from #OccupyOccupy. The kit is encouraged to be used as a protest tool.