Aumms or Cyber-Dada: Forays into Neu Digital Poetry

Description

What happens when feeds are mixed together randomly?

My workshop addresses the active process of hybridization of social media feeds into dadaist visual poems, a practice endemic to the online community known as “People that Aumm sometimes and are also... ooohhhh.....”.

It showcases first the history of this online art collective and presents how to make a neu-digital-poem, using an updated version of Tristan Tzara's 1920 method.

What we will be doing basically is a digital exquisite cadaver using our timelines. We are utilizing our own likes, follows and cookies to pierce through and bring forth the unconscious language of the timeline. The goal is to mesh (hybridize) the feeds to adduce new meanings and ideas.

Timetable

The session begins with an exploration of the online community, its history, and a presentation of their body of work. (7 min) Attendees are encouraged to voice their thoughts and feelings about the images they see. (2 min) After the brief presentation, the process of creation behind the artworks is explained through a live presentation. (7 min) Questions. (5 min) Attendees are invited to go explore their feeds and that of other attendees to create digital poems. (30 min). This is the activity section. Attendees who wish to can share their creations with the rest of the attendees (9 min)

Interaction

Attendees are encouraged to visit each other's feeds and use the image and words present there to create their own digital poems. The results of this random online exquisite cadaver are usually comical. It is a rather fun activity and people are encouraged to show each other their poems if they desire.

Takeaway

The main takeaway from this activity is the shift from viewer to maker in online participation, the idea that one can be active in the process of scrolling. The concept of hybridity is very interesting in online communities because the member is both "poster" and consumer of content. And finally, attendees will have learned about an avant-garde online community formed around the exploration of the meaning and new methods of creative practices firmly rooted in the digital world.

Outcomes

Participants will come out with digital collages, poems, pot-pourris of posts which they will be able to assemble into mini-zines, digital or even analog by printing them. Those who agree can have their collages published on Sometimes Gallery as part of on-going research and curation of new digital dadaist poetry. Those who agree can even join the online community and share their work with the members.

Abstract

Social network sites are based on the technological foundation of Web 2.0 which enables the creations and exchange of user-generated content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Facebook is by far the most popular SNS an active user base of 2.6 billion (Clement, 2020). One of the lesser researched features in the world of web archives is Facebook’s community functionality: Facebook Groups. These creativity-driven niche groups take up a unique space at the intersection of social networking sites and content communities (Karnik, 2013). Going beyond the objective of sharing existing content, these groups serve as creative spaces; platforms for sharing personal artworks, or, in internet slang, “Original Content”. These groups serve as part of a subset of communities known by researchers as “Weird Facebook” (Kleinman, 2017). They can be described as “a loose conglomeration of pages that post bizarre image macros” (Pederson, 2014).

As shown in my talk about the “Simpsons Shitposting” group “Why Won’t People On The Internet Let Things Die?”, these communities displace the online spectator from their position of passive consumer into the role of active creator/artist.

I have been a member of “People that Aumm sometimes and are also... ooohhhh.....” for the past 5 years. A thriving artist community that I have seen grow to up to 20-thousand members. The members of the group create digital visual poems in the style collages or "macros". Their practice and method are anchored in the Dadaist tradition of art-making, an update on Tristan Tzara's mode of writing poetry.

Here is the method:

To make a digital poem Take a website. Take a snipping tool. Choose a feed as updated as you are planning to make your poem. Take screenshots of the posts. Copy paste them unto a blank digital canvas. Move everything randomly across the surface. Move the layers one after the other in the order in which they were pasted. Copy conscientiously. The poem will be like you. The poem will be liked by you. And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

Borrowing from the practices of Surrealist and Automatist writers/artists, this workshop seeks to utilize the collective unconscious (accessed through the "feed") in order to come up with funny, exciting, new, associations. What we will be doing basically is a digital exquisite cadaver with our timelines. We are utilizing our own likes, follows and cookies to pierce through and bring forth the unconscious language of the timeline.

This is essentially an exercise in automatic writing. We are composing new texts or collage from posts that already exist. Scrolling has become a modern ritual. We do it religiously 5 times a day, at dusk and at dawn. Through this workshop, we seek to unearth the unspoken text of our timelines, and see our activity of scrolling under a new lens and effectively we transform this often passive looking process (looking at the feed) into an active creative process (making something with the feed).