"This is a digital collage", said Lili Vieira de Carvalho, Associate Director of the Diane Farris Gallery.

She held up a picture frame filled with what appeared to be headshots of an eclectic mix of people.

"They're all hackers."

"We saw the works as JPEGS," she continued. "But when they came in, they are amazing."

She put the frame back and pulled a canvas off the shelf. It was a cityscape, stitched entirely from zippers, tags instructing method of wash, and clothing labels.

"It's all fabric . . . you can almost read it: '100% cotton. No bleach.' "

These visual art pieces, among myriads of others, will compose the Diane Farris Gallery's Twitter / Art + Social Media exhibit, an exhibit which will explore the influence of social networking platforms on artistic practice, and the ramifications therein. Approximately 100 works — each no more than 22" x 22" in size — by over 40 artists will be showcased, literally wall-to-wall, in the gallery's small but comfortable space.

"The whole movement among artists and social media is outside the commercial gallery environment," said Vieira de Carvalho. "They are using social media to show their work. So they are all independent artists."

These artists responded to the gallery’s open call for submissions, and two major strands of work have begun to surface as the exhibition develops: pieces constructed through the use of social media, and pieces constructed from traditional mediums that are inspired from social media. Either way, the response has been diverse, ranging from video and web-based works to physical books composed entirely of Craigslist entries.

"Web-based works that are not going to happen physically in the gallery will be on the blog," Vieira de Carvalho added.

"Most of the artists are from here,” she continued. “Some of the ones outside Vancouver searched on Facebook and asked, 'Anybody in Vancouver?' They sent someone to drop their art off. [The gallery could not accept shipped works.] We have some from Canada, but also England, Holland, Indonesia, United States of course."

"We had this four-day drop-off schedule. I saw the work only on the Internet, and we accepted the submission and chose the work like that. The real thing surprises me. That work with stitches? I had no idea that it was like that. It looked like an illustration, and even though we read the caption, you just don’t realize it."

"One of the submissions we got, the participant said, ‘I use social media, a lot, but kind of because I feel that I am forced to.’ Kind of resisting the whole thing. He said, 'I kind of have to use it, but I do not feel confident with it. At the same time, I feel like it’s in the air.' "

"It works in different ways for each artist, but I think that — definitely — whoever is not taking advantage of it will somehow be left behind. When you go to art school, you have connections there, and you share studios, you have the critiques where people are going to talk about your work, you have teachers to give you feedback, and then school finishes and you are on your own. [Social media] recreates this support system . . . you can learn things by yourself and have feedback. You can sell, you can show, there are images coming to you so fast."

Networking aside, with sites like FFFFOUND.com, YayEverday.com, and BOOOOOOOM.com, among others, this is undeniably true. People are able to submerge themselves in visual culture, and interact with each other within it.

"It’s very rich,” Vieira de Carvalho added. “It’s changing the scene, for sure."

“We are going to have three events. One of them was submitted as an art project — Draw by Night (DrawByNight.com). It’s really cool, it’s a drawing party. They give a subject, like the one on March 24 at Vancouver Film School: ‘civil monsters’. Ours is going to be ‘factory rejects’. Prototypes, things that didn’t make it, gadgets that were not made. Myron Campbell is the producer of this event - he submitted it as his art work. We decided that there will be 35 people. We are going to invite 10 artists, and the other 25 slots will be anybody who [sends in an] RSVP. Paper sheets will be on the walls . . . everyone will draw, standing by the wall. It will be like musical chairs. When the drawings are ready, everyone will sign on the back. That way there will be some [professional] signatures to give more value to the piece. Those works will be up at the show, for sale.

"The profits are going to a kind of max Draw by Night event," she added. "So they can do something special."

"The exhibition will change during the course of April. Draw by Night is on the 27th, and on the 13th we are going to have a talk about the basics of social media: "Social Media for Visual Artists" by Rebecca Coleman, who has been doing workshops at Alliance for Arts (AllianceForArts.com), and Kris Krug (KrisKrug.com). He was on our selection committee and is a kind of social media rock star. He has 7,500 people following him on Twitter."

"It’s going to be a quick thing," she added. "Forty-five minutes on a Tuesday afternoon, but open to everybody, to have kind of an overview of social media if you are lost."

"The third event is a panel with the selection committee. When we sat down to go through the works and to talk about the subject, and we were reading the statements of the artists’ use of social media, lots of questions were raised. The conversation was really interesting. I thought, ‘Maybe we can just share this — what we don’t know, maybe we can ask’."

"We are just putting the questions out there, and seeing what we get. We are not a public gallery; we are not an artist-run centre," she said. "We are very unique as a ‘commercial school’ . . . we have students coming every day, they come here for free, they see art, they browse through information, they learn something, it’s a service we provide."

"At the same time, as a commercial gallery, we are not tied to an academic commitment,” she said. "We don’t have a commitment to find the answers."

More often than not, questions provide a much richer understanding than answers — and that, more than anything, is what makes the Twitter / Art + Social Media exhibit so special.

There is so much being said about Twitter and social media, but very little being asked. Indeed, as Vieira de Carvalho pointed out, "We are just starting to understand what is happening."