{"id":7759,"date":"2017-12-19T01:43:31","date_gmt":"2017-12-19T01:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/?p=7759"},"modified":"2020-02-12T21:20:47","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T21:20:47","slug":"new-genres-cultural-hijack-scholars-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/?p=7759","title":{"rendered":"Cultural HiJack: [Scholar’s Library]"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the same day, I read both the beginning of <\/span>Beautiful Trouble<\/span><\/i> by Andrew Boyd and a piece assigned by guest artist, Mandy Morrison. <\/span>Beautiful Trouble<\/span><\/i> is a guide for artists who want to work in socially, visually, and performatively effective ways. The piece Mandy Morrison assigned was \u201cDancing with Twitter,\u201d a piece in <\/span>The Mobile Story<\/span><\/i> written by Susan Kozel, Mia Keinanen and Leena Rouhiainen. Their performance, entitled <\/span>\u201cIntuiTweet<\/span><\/i>,\u201d (Farman, 81) explores the kinesthetic sensations of movement as transmitted over Twitter and realtime re-enacted by other collaborators. <\/span>Beautiful Trouble<\/span><\/i>\u2019s piece on \u201cMedia-Jacking,\u201d written by Patrick Reinsborough, Doyle Canning and Joshua Kahn Russell, discusses using an opposition\u2019s media power and time to create a disruption in favor of your cause or message (Boyd, 72). In light of the recent rise of politicians using Twitter as their broadcast, I thought it would be appropriate to take back Twitter. This idea solidified as I reread Daniel Dennett\u2019s <\/span>Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination<\/span><\/i>; one quote about replication stuck in my mind: “a scholar is just a library’s way of making another library\u201d (Dennett, 126). That day, I started the Twitter \u201cScholar\u2019s Library<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"twitter<\/a><\/p>\n

Since then, Scholar\u2019s Library has been a project that I have worked on intermittently, adding to the Library over several months. Each tweet is composed in a consistent format, both visually and performatively. My initial goal for Scholars Library is to:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Interact with people, semi-organically in physical and digital space<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Detail an aspect of who these people are, and therefore how to read their contribution<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Produce a \u2018fact,\u2019 whether factual or otherwise<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For a visual format, I wanted to take each of these into consideration and develop a finished piece that was both different from the physical interactions and exactly the same in its intention. I created a simple formula for this:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"thing\"<\/span><\/p>\n

    The consistent performance aspect was initially unintentional. As I began speaking to people to create tweets, I found that I was very nervous and often couldn\u2019t quite think of what to say. I noticed after the third person that in my nervous nature, I had repeated the same three questions every time:<\/span><\/p>\n