Playing games with the form and function of Twitter is nothing new. Tim Waters started the ubiquitous “Sometimes I just want to copy someone else’s status… ” meme, which has already lived several cycles on both Twitter and Facebook, and still reawakens every couple months. Jonah Peretti created a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience via a series of inter-linked tweets. Carles, anonymous author of Hipster Runoff, has used Twitter to create pop-art.
In the days before Christmas, Carles produced this series of tweets about running into his ex at various suburban establishments:
It’s essentially a repetition of a single tweet, over and over, with only small variations. It soon becomes apparent that not only are at least most if not all of these tweets false, they’re not even all meant to be read. Warhol’s small multiples of Campbell’s soup comes to mind, each silkscreened with color variation. Maybe the viewer will take to one of the variations, or the [something] of the variations as a whole, or the comment the piece makes about the commoditization of art. On a basic, functional level, Carles’ is making ‘personalized’ content to re-tweet, ‘personalized’ being used in the same sense that one applies the term to a single model of Nike shoes being produced in different color-ways.
Carles turned his twitter account into a brand that one can ‘wear’ via ‘customized’ retweets – he’s commodified the tweet.
Warhol’s true significance is much misunderstood IMO. It’s a question of ironic reaction against abstract expressionism, and some of the theoretical stupidities involved in promoting/justifying it (eg. Rosenberg “Action Painting” — by this I don’t mean to disparage AE generally, as I’m a fan of Gorky & Pollock. But even Pollock admitted he had to obliterate the figurative elements in his action paintings to make them purely “abstract” and fit the theory). This may come as a shock to some, but Warhol didn’t really believe that 50 tacky B&W silkscreens of the Mona Lisa were better than the original. Have you read his autobiography, A to B & Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol?
If you consider abstract expressionism was covertly funded/promoted by Western intelligence (a strong case is made in the book, The Cultural Cold War by Francis Stonor Saunders) then its an open question as regards the “End of Art History” and a simulated history and art market. With art history’s internal discourse subverted, criticism/theory just came to justify an insane market– and politically-driven art historical trajectory after the fact.
****
As I see it, one of the problems with CYOA and exquisite corpse efforts on twitter is the character length. Decent fiction has to have some variation in sentence length/structure, and twitlonger is too obtrusive. I wish they’d make the character length a customizable parameter with 140 as the default.
But, unfortunately, twitter doesn’t seem interested in developing themselves as a platform for the intersection of MMO& pervasive gaming (“Massive Multiplayer Online Mobile” MMOM?). Foursquare is interesting, but IMO would be better integrated with language games, and the deeper game mechanics/scenarios this would allow. They allowed the game mechanic to be too much driven just by commercialization.
I’m not a programmer myself or an expert on twitter, but it seems to me they would have voting/ranking in the sidebar thread (so celebrities with tons of followers could allow their followers to push questions to the top with votes, or vote up the best title or exquisite corpse submissions for mass-collaborative lyric/fiction projects), if they were interested in gamification of twitter. People have been suggesting it for a long time. They could probably do something better with lists/timelines too that would be more game friendly.
It’s a shame because there’d be great potential there IMO – not only for virtual world interface games that lead back into “real” life, but also for game-based revenue streams.
Most independent efforts I’ve seen in this direction (play140, artwiculation, twitter golf, etc.) are still fairly weak IMO. But who knows, there’s so much different stuff being done. Maybe somebody ‘s got something great I haven’t seen yet?
Carles is the Warhol of Twitter
Playing games with the form and function of Twitter is nothing new. Tim Waters started the ubiquitous “Sometimes I just want to copy someone else’s status… ” meme, which has already lived several cycles on both Twitter and Facebook, and still reawakens every couple months. Jonah Peretti created a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience via a series of inter-linked tweets. Carles, anonymous author of Hipster Runoff, has used Twitter to create pop-art.
In the days before Christmas, Carles produced this series of tweets about running into his ex at various suburban establishments:
It’s essentially a repetition of a single tweet, over and over, with only small variations. It soon becomes apparent that not only are at least most if not all of these tweets false, they’re not even all meant to be read. Warhol’s small multiples of Campbell’s soup comes to mind, each silkscreened with color variation. Maybe the viewer will take to one of the variations, or the [something] of the variations as a whole, or the comment the piece makes about the commoditization of art. On a basic, functional level, Carles’ is making ‘personalized’ content to re-tweet, ‘personalized’ being used in the same sense that one applies the term to a single model of Nike shoes being produced in different color-ways.
Carles turned his twitter account into a brand that one can ‘wear’ via ‘customized’ retweets – he’s commodified the tweet.