Bruce Andrews' 25-hour twitter project

Al Filreis

https://www.facebook.com/BruceAndrewsTwitterProject

I'm pleased to pass along information about Bruce Andrews's 25-hour twitter project, April 1, 2014.

Bruce Andrews// 25 Hour Twitter sculpture & performance
Curated by Maria Chavez

On April 1st, 2014, Bruce Andrews and Maria Chavez will collaborate on a 25 hour performance piece on the social media platform, Twitter.

After experiencing an intermedia performance of Bruce Andrews late last year, Maria sensed a striking affinity between Bruce's text/ language work and Twitter's interactive focus: short modular posts, limited to a handful of words, with a stress on vivid conciseness, wide open to immediate responses and links to a variety of media.

The Bruce Andrews 25 hour piece is meant to use Twitter as sculptural documentation, becoming a real time archive of Bruce Andrews's current poetic writing and the responses it elicits in real time. Using a social media platform as an exhibition space, Maria Chavez will tweet a Bruce Andrews language text, every 5 minutes for 25 hours. That’s the 300 parts of a new poetic sequence, ‘Improper’, designed and edited for this occasion.

Each twitter post will also have a link leading to a Soundcloud web page made specifically for the piece, with audio recordings of Andrews, performing each tweeted ‘poem’ individually.

We're hoping for lots of interaction — retweets, liking and favoriting, parallel poetic comments, anecdotes, translations, mash-ups, sound files, photos, graphics, video: the internet sky's the limit.

Once the 25 hour time period has lapsed, the Twitter profile will sit on its own, with all of the added links and responses. (Not updating a social media platform like Twitter becomes a gesture towards the 'sculptural' element of the piece. An archive begins to take shape.)

BECOME A SPONSOR

We are asking individuals and organizations in the arts and in the literary world to become sponsors — to commit to sharing and retweeting and reposting about the project. It’s an opportunity to reach a larger audience and network for interaction.

Since the Twitter social media platform is free, your support as a sponsor requires only the ‘invisible’ currency that the Internet has created: better access to social media participation. This project wants to test out a new arrangement with artists and organizations working together, providing value and possibilities of interaction without cost.

To become a sponsor, all you have to do is reply to this email address [mariadchavez@gmail.com] with the statement “I agree to the sponsorship terms and will participate in BRUCE ANDREWS 25 Hour Twitter Sculpture.” Make sure to include this letter in the body of the text.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF A SPONSOR

In the next few weeks, each sponsor will receive an email from Maria Chavez outlining #hashtags and links to past work. During this time, the goal is to sketch out some background and share some history of Bruce Andrews’s text and performance works. The project will require no more than 3 social media posts and/or tweets per sponsor, a week prior to the event.

The day of the 25 hour performance will require no more than a few retweets and posts of the Twitter performance link, per sponsor. (Of course, we’d love for sponsors to do more announcing and retweeting — ‘more’ is always welcome.)

There are so many layers that can come into play when thinking about social media and its possible relationships to artists and organizations. With your participation, this project can help to push forward a new form of interacting and presenting when it comes to art and intermedia on the internet.

We look forward to your working with us, and signing up to follow us now on Twitter & Facebook.

https://twitter.com/BruceAndrews25h

www.facebook.com/BruceAndrewsTwitterProject

March 10, 2014

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.