David Horvitz is traveling from San Francisco to Washington D.C. to hand-deliver your tweets. This is why he’s not crazy.
Brooklyn-based artist David Horvitz thinks you can separate the broad history of long-distance communication into two distinctive epochs: before the telegraph, and after the telegraph. Let’s say B.T. and A.T.
That means we’re still in A.T. Because, no matter the dizzying litany of advances made since the telegraph’s debut in the 19th century—voices carried by telephone wires, voices thrown by satellites and cellphones, words tossed back and forth near-instantly by e-mail, words and pictures ricocheting within the impossibly large but still one-stoplight villages of Twitter and Facebook—there remains an essential element in communication that we left behind in B.T.: our messages no longer require a human messenger.
So, when Shane Brennan, curator of Creative Time Tweets, contacted David and asked him to contribute a piece to Creative Time’s series of art projects meant to investigate the “constantly expanding definition of public space in the age of social media,” he was already considering how he might investigate the absence of this messenger in today’s communication. What he came up with is #VadeMecum (5992. I Will, with Pleasure, Take Letters for You), which will see him travel from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., transcribing along the way any tweets made between June 17 and 23 with the hashtag #VadeMecum (Latin for “go with me”). David’s project is the second in the Creative Time Tweets series. The first, a performance piece called #24hPort by the artist Man Bartlett, and the third, by soon-to-be first-time Twitter user Jill Magid, all mine similar notions of this means of public communication, but in different ways.
Functioning as a contrived messenger for a naturally messenger-devoid medium, he’ll physically bear these tweets across the country and deliver them to the Library of Congress.
“It’s like I’m taking Twitter back a century,” David said. “I’m just kind of exploring what was lost and trying to get people to think about that transition. When you think about Twitter, you don’t realize the kind of infrastructure that exists, and the previous infrastructure that existed before that. And I guess there is a nostalgia or romanticizing about this kind of messenger figure.”
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Creating the artifice of a messenger for a system as potentially frivolous and masturbatory as Twitter is sort of a chilling idea. I love Twitter, but even as a devotee, I’d be fooling myself if I didn’t recognize that, by sheer nature of a technology designed so you can say anything to a guaranteed “audience” and, through merely attaching a hashtag, tap into an even larger theoretical audience—the millions of people who have, attached to their e-mail account, a Twitter—there exists not only the option but often the impetus to just say the dumbest shit you can possibly think up.
For example, trending as I write this: #SignsUaSideChick. Imagine a group of people, real, living people with insurance payments and favorite alcoholic drinks, dedicated to carrying sacks of messages from one place to another filled only with bad jokes about cheating on your girlfriend.
I asked David whether he thought adding or subtracting a messenger inherently changes the message.
“No, it doesn’t, but in the understanding of society, it does,” he said. “The message is the same, but how the message used to go along with messengers: they were like travel companions in a sense. This person would carry it as physical weight; but in actuality, no, it doesn’t really change it, it changes the structural framework.
“But I guess it also changes society, because things can be sped up so fast,” David went on. “Obviously things would be different, now it can become more trivial, whereas back then it might have had not just the physical weight of it being carried but also the emotional weight, because there was an actual distance that had to be overcome: this letter will take thirty days to get to there and will have to be carried 3,000 miles. It’s not like, ‘oh I’m going to send my friend an e-mail who’s in Tokyo right now and tell him I had tacos for lunch.’ So, I guess it does change it.”
Not only does the nature of the conversation change, but by stripping the messenger from the equation, we lose an entire mode of existing within dialogue. Think back to when you were younger, or even some recent night out. That germ of affection that might exist in one person for another, but mainly in the mind of your friend saying, “Hey, he likes you.” She’s the messenger. And being the messenger is a role with its own innate significance.
“I don’t know, back in the day it was probably just a job, but then it’s like, you were traveling as this kind of conduit that’s moving in between two people and you’re carrying language, you’re carrying everything in the world, like love and death and business and whatever, it’s going through you. But it is still like, a job, for someone,” David said. In #VadeMecum, that someone is David.
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Many of David’s previous projects have revolved around the idea of travel and communication over distance. One of the most famous, Head in Freezer, involved, through the principles of SEO, designating a lengthy number that, when typed into Google, would result in a deluge of pictures of people with their heads stuck in their freezers. The meme has participants worldwide. Other projects ask for donors to fund his trips to exotic world locales like Okinawa, where he’ll retrieve for them rare shells or send them letters from said places.
In addition to adding the artifice of travel to Twitter, David will also reflect on what used to be the constrictions of expression due to the nature of the telegraph. When he tweets his own observations and thoughts, he’ll use the stock phrases created by A.C. Baldwin in his 1853 book The Traveler’s Vade Mecum; or Instantaneous Letter Writer, by Mail or Telegraph, for the Convenience of Persons Traveling on Business or for Pleasure, and for Others, Whereby a Vast Amount of Time, Labor, and Trouble is Saved. Contained within the awesomely titled book are 8,466 prefabricated sentences, each with a four-digit code that could be used in place of writing out the words.
Naturally, as he transcribes all the tweets, he’ll be reading them one by one. I asked him how he thought reading, say, a tweet advertising the project from Creative Time would compare with reading one that sought to contribute to the artistry of the project, and he said that he’d certainly think more about the tweets that attempted to mean something; but really, if the tweet didn’t mean anything, he’d think about how it didn’t mean anything. Each tweet would get a thought.
And because one of David’s previous projects involved the exchange of one dollar (from you) for one minute of his thinking about you (from him), participating in #VadeMecum is actually a really great deal, because it’s free (which is a whole different conversation we could have regarding the nature of communication and message-carrying).
“See, that was an interesting thing when we started talking about it: obviously people are going to need to use the hashtag to advertise it as well as participate, and then like, so, do I write them all out? Even if it’s Creative Time blogging, ‘Oh, start using the hashtag,’” David said. “But it’s all part of it, because when you participate in it, you have to read through all of them, whether the participants are actually responding to, oh, make a message, or it’s someone who’s saying ‘Hey, check this out.’ So you can’t really say it’s not part of it because you can’t really filter it out.”
On Twitter, the substitute of an assumed audience for an intentional addressee both makes you feel like you’re speaking at once to all your followers and like you’re speaking only to yourself, and this is odd. It can provoke grandiose statements as well as impossibly insignificant ones; it breeds expression with the sole purpose of informing others as well as statements that couldn’t be interesting to anyone but the speaker. #VadeMecum reminds us that, even with Twitter, there is a messenger—though it might be inhuman. And, before you tweet, think about whether what you’re about to say would justify being a weight in someone’s arms.
—Photo Rev Stan/Flickr
