I am a writer and artist living in Brooklyn, NY. I currently work full time producing Web content for PBS. I also write short fiction and cultural commentary, which has appeared in 
A few days ago, I retweeted the same Childish Gambino lyrics from maybe a dozen different people. The line is roughly, “Eating oreos like the white girls that blow me.” I meant to tweet it over at @WhitePowerMilk, but (happily) accidentally put it on my personal twitter. I think that’s how this conversation got started about retweet curation, twitter as “art”, and what it means to be a troll…
@kurokowa says:
Dude, I’m done, I just can’t take it anymore #intheunfollowcategory
@nateXhill says:
why are you telling me you’re unfollowing? What’s your motivation here?
@nateXhill says:
Maybe I have something to learn from someone who wants to make a thing out of unfollowing me?
@kurokowa says:
following someone is a public endorsement, I wanted my #unfollow to be just as public.
I don’t normally try and have any sort of serious engagement with Twitter conversations beyond jokes, but I guess when I do I go all the way.
Had a really long convo regarding Twitter as a platform for artistic practice this last week, after someone made a public display about his ‘unfollow’ of my friend Nate Hill, who has been doing recent works that involve single purpose Twitter accounts that draw attention to different types of racial issues and occasionally going on retweet rampages related to these projects on his main account.
My point of view here is that Twitter is essentially an editorial platform. Any sort of artistic value to be found in a Twitter account itself has to derive from the editorial style/curation of retweets and strike a smart balance. In my opinion, since there are already engineers and developers defining the world of interaction in that space, the art of it is more about nuance and editorial style. Since your audience is already self selecting, as people ‘choose’ to follow you, if your actions and editorial style are just annoying people, or feel like trolling, then then what you are doing is probably not working in favor of what you are trying to say.
Anyways, there’s a lot of ideas floating around in this, and it might be worth reading the whole conversation if this is something that interests you.
Also, one of the things I didn’t talk about, which I have seen artists do effectively, is appropriate feeds from Twitter in new contexts, utilizing the real time nature of the platform, the hashtag system, or grab data that gets used to create a separate digital object. I’m really only trying to discuss the phenomenon of creating single purpose accounts as an artistic project here. I think the conversation of ‘Twitter as a tool for art’ is a lot broader, but almost always requires people to artists to create a new context for the tweets/conversations happening in that space.
