2XTWEETSXMODEMSXTXTXTWEET (2X): Combining Media archeology and electronic literature to support societal change through design

Through the case study of the 2XTWEETSXMODEMSXTXTXTWEET (abbreviated 2X), this contribution will situate the potential of using Twitter’s publically available data streams as inputs for the creation of media archeological (Hertz and Parikka, 2012) textual assemblages hijacking the dominant narratives of our internet “cloud” and acting as conversational pieces (Bleecker, 2009) that support social change. Moreover, revisiting this installation intertwining Twitter data with screeching dial-up modems and using text as a raw materiality in order to make tangible invisible internet processes, this contribution will explore how our ubiquitous social media platforms can be detoured and reappropriated through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in order to enable critical technical practitioners (Sengers et al, 2006) to ask through design foundational questions about the political and ecological impact of our ubiquitous internet. This contribution will also contextualise the research-creation process of the 2X inside a network of arts and design projects. Moreover, it will build from works of electronic literature in order to debunk, at the level of the project, our common beliefs gravitating around the internet’s illusions of immateriality, neutrality and atemporality. This will enable us to ground the field as a prominent actor of change: that materialise and offer, through its body of situated practices, key questions about the sociotechnical and eco-material conditions of our data transmission technologies. The contribution will be divided into three parts. The first part will expand on our social media “infrastructural inversion” (Star and Bowker, 2000) and its potential for electronic literature practitioners. We will then explore how media archeology can be combined with the materiality of language for the creation of textual assemblages that support and contribute to societal change and critique. Finally, our third section will draw from the previous parts in order to revisit, in dialogue with the 2X, three projects emerging from the electronic literature’s field. Expanding from these works will enable us to further claim and contextualise the role of electronic literature in asking foundational questions about climate change and the internet.