Friday, January 23, 2009

140 or bust: medium making

This is a fact: media beget media. In an all-too-simplistic teleology, glyphs led to simple text which led to long-form writing which led to print and so on and so forth. As top-level abstract constructions become more ingrained, and so transparent, we begin to lower their status and treat them as transmission layers. (For anyone studying at Georgia Tech, this is the first few lectures of 6313; that is, here I'm a transmission layer.) This process of deprecating representation layers to transmission (and further inscription) layers allows for new forms of manifest expression.

Here I propose a challenge: Twitter poetry.

For the next few weeks, I would like us to explore the possibilities of the limited format of Twitter (140-characters, including spaces and punctuation; no page formatting) as tantamount to constraints of, say, a sonnet. Let Twitter not be the layer of representation, but that of transmission. Use its form to shape certain constraints, while delving into what is medium specific.

As for the resulting poems, please post them in the comments (either in full or as links to the full text somewhere else, such as a Twitter page).

Tweet tweet.

2 comments:

The Minute Waltz said...

Being blown off/& being blown up/parallel well:/I, by and by,/wind up/pieced-'part,/cheek-chapped,/burnt and burned/about futures & flames.

Character count: 140!

Bobby said...

A random assortment[carefully chosen]all letters in the bag. There she sat, cup of tea finished. Her Songbird returned from winter slumber.

139 Characters.