Twitterature: Reassembling the Social as Art

2025-04-17 - 2025-04-17

Eivind Røssaak

Room 201, Zhixing Building, Yangming Campus, NYCU & Hybrid event

Abstract
The emergence of social media platforms at the turn of the century transformed the means of expression, creativity, and sharing, while also shaping new modes of fatigue, anxiety, and corporate control. The new attachments to informational flows have affected habits of living as well as art and literature. “We live in an age of quotation, appropriation, recycling, and repetition,” artist Cory Arcangel writes. Twitter (now X) was launched in 2006, and Twitterature appeared in 2008, exemplified by new forms of literature following the short-form constraints of early Twitter (i.e., 140 characters or fewer). We deploy an expanded hermeneutics as well as Actor-Network Theory to read Arcangel's Working on My Novel (Penguin, 2014). The book is a hybrid between old and new media, writing and hacking, high and low, imagination and addiction, formalism and affects, perhaps a theory of the gimmick, and perhaps an add-on to Roland Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel. Students are invited to speak on social media and art.

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Event Details
Date & Time: 17/4/2025, 10:00-12:00
Venue: Room 201, Zhixing Building, Yangming Campus, NYCU
Online Access: https://meet.google.com/ygj-mxny-nnk
Speaker: Dr. Eivind Røssaak (Associate Professor, the National Library of Norway)
Moderator: Dr. Louis Lo (Associate Professor, Institute of Visual Studies, NYCU)
Respondent: Ms. Grace Cheng (Lecturer, Language Learning and Writing Center, NYCU)
Organizer: National Yang-Ming Chiao-Tung University International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS-NYCU)

Biography Eivind Røssaak is a writer, guitarist, and Associate Research Professor at the National Library of Norway. With Patrick Jagoda, he taught the seminar Network Aesthetics/ Network Culture at the Center for Disciplinary Innovation, University of Chicago. He has published several books such as The Archive in Motion (2010), Memory in Motion (2017) and The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice (MIT Press, forthcoming, 2025), and articles such as "Classification, Eugenics, and the Archive: The Colonial Machine in Sápmi" (2025).

Reading list Cory Arcangel, Working on my novel (Penguin 2014)
Eivind Røssaak, "Twitter as a Book." In E. Røssaak, The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice (MIT 2025, forthcoming) - excerpt available
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford 2005)
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick (Harvard 2020)

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