Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
These three anonymous Twitter accounts (@Justin_Buber, @KantyeW, and @KimKierkegaard, respectively) all find poetry in remixing the purest expression of high culture, philosophy, with perhaps the lowest expression of popular culture: the pop celebrity tweet.
This Twitter account is part of an artistic and literary performance in social media, consisting of short poetic snippets of Surrealism, the absurd, textual, photographic, and video entries, dark humor, and links to the other component of the project, a Tumblr site aptly URL’d http://lazenby.tumblr.com (depicted below).
Note: This is the second in a series of 2 postings on “Postmeaning.” Here’s a link to the first entry.
…stmeaning” also via Twitter, starting on June 11, 2011, providing a snippet of the 100 word text and a link to the note or audio file in the Facebook page. An interesting detail about the Twitter via Facebook publication is that it cuts the 100-word posting down to a aize Twitter could manage, including making room for the shortened link and ellipsis. This creates a secondary cut, one that isn’t designed by Knoebel, which potentially creates a new textual iteration which could be interpreted differently from the original. Perhaps this accounts for the shift to shorter entries on July 21, which creates a direct concordance between the Facebook and Twitter texts, while at the same time allowing them to develop different audiences by eliminating the link to the Facebook Page.
This Twitter bot generates tweets using two data sets: the text of the MIT Press book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and any tweets with the #10print hashtag. The generator uses a Markov chain process to analyze a text and determine the probability of any word following another to generate a new string of words that resembles the original and publishes it on Twitter. Here are some examples:
On January 31, 2013, Mark Sample’s Twitter account, @samplereality, went missing under mysterious circumstances involving a Dutch hitchiker, a very old book, and a fictitious closing of Dulles airport (read the previous entry for a more detailed account). His other social media accounts went silent also, and for a few days no one heard from him through those networks.
Mark Sample has disappeared from Twitter, or has he? The link above leads to an archive of all his Tweets, which reference his final tweets, ostensibly from a Dulles airport that was sealed up by FEMA, including a link to an video of him sending a message to his wife and family, that “the book is not what they think it is.” What is this book and what is the whole situation about?
This Twitter based netprov collected under a title headed by the word “ballad” provokes thought on the relation between this fictional piece and this ancient poetic form. The ballad, a form rooted in oral tradition, was often about sensational, comic, and tragic events and served as a conduit for stories from one region or time to another. With the invention of print, the broadside ballad reinforced the tradition of spreading news in poetic form.