Tweet Jockey: an ambient play installation using live video feed and Oulipo poetry (2009)

Tweet Jockey was designed with Amanda Tasse and Diego Costa, my fellow PhD students in the iMAP program at USC. It was installed at the Zemeckis Center in the Interactive Media lab and was created using Max MSP/Jitter. Tweet Jockey develops the idea of ambient play and engages users with different layers of interaction, offering them the casual possibilities of becoming performers, VJs, or audience.

Audience members are free to come and play with an interface that controls the live video feeds of other audience members who are called upon to pick and recite from a website of streaming tweets. Dissociated from any original context, this “tweet poetry” is performed to various surreal degrees by any player that wishes to interact with one of three laptops distributed in different rooms. Their image is procedurally composited live with found footage and animation and projected as an immersive panorama in another room. Anyone is free to come up to the Tweet Jockey interface and mix the video feeds, manipulate audio and visual effects to transform the input, in effect acting as the DJ or VJ of the spontaneous performances occuring in the other rooms. A wandering, mobile audience enjoys the show and peripherally engages with the drifting, associative, surprising narrative that emerges from the play of the tweets.

Untitled from Lauren Fenton on Vimeo.

check out Tweet Jockey’s soundtrack!