Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
This Twitter character came to life in the “Reality: Being @spenserpratt” netprov, was christened “Tempspence” by Pratt’s followers (as a “temporary” Spencer), and lives on in this Twitter account, along with a community called The Tempspence poets. Their symbiotic existence was sustained by social media interactions of a group of people that came together through this netprov, and extended the life of the performance beyond its metaphorical covers.
This Twitter fiction netprov is based on a simple enough premise: reality star Spencer Pratt lost his his cellphone while in London for Celebrity Big Brother, and it was found by a struggling poet who began to use it in whimsical ways to promote poetry. During the three-week performance, the poet prompted Pratt’s followers to write poems based on constraint he provided, was outed as an impostor, dubbed as Tempspence, continued to develop a relationship with his readers as he shared details of his life, and eventually migrated (reborn?) to a new account, @Tempspence, as Pratt regained control of the account.
Occupy MLA is back!
But don’t be alarmed just yet, since this resurgence of the controversial netprov, takes the shape of a published archive (linked to in this entry’s title). This documentation is exemplary, including a 3-minute introductory video, a link to an artists’ statement at The Chronicle of Higher Education (with a fascinating comment thread), an indexed and color-coded archive of the tweets, and an Excel file with the raw data from the four Twitter accounts that form the heart of this work. With this resource, you can read most of this timely performance that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, satire and activism, and virtual and embodied spaces.
This Twitter based netprov was organized, launched, and led by a transmedia storytelling guru, responsible for numerous similar events in entertainment media. It arises out of a pun, and a fascination with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu stories, famous for their mythos, iconography, and verbal style. This alternate reality game is fascinating to reconstruct 3 years after the event because of the challenge in capturing such a distributed event it was documented in a variety of Web services and pages that are no longer available, except through services like the Internet Archives.
The event organizers— Jay Bushman, Kris Kowall, Ryan Paul, and Josh Lewis— created a wiki to sketch out an overarching narrative, inform prospective participants about the Cthulu mythos, and script archetypal roles for players to breathe life into. The roles were “the questing professor,” “the tormented artist,” “the suspicious citizen,” and “the gibbering cultist.”
On February 4, 2013 as the eastern seaboard of the United States was blanketed in a snowstorm (and the Twittersphere with weather reports), another kind of precipitation started to accumulate around the fictional town of Troy. As its inhabitants tweeted about this odd weather, this mysterious black substance began to be identified in their streams as #sootfall, providing readers a way to identify tweets related to this phenomenon and begin to follow narrative threads around this curious event.