Michelle Vaughan’s installation of 100 Tweets is up at the DUMBO Arts Center until Sunday.
Michelle Vaughan produced “100 Tweets” from September 2010 – June 2011. This is a hand typeset letterpress project printed at The Arm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
For “100 Tweets”, Vaughan spent months combing her Twitter feed in search of 100 comments which fit into her vision of the project as a whole. In the beginning, she collected snarky, throw-away tweets mostly centered on banal and mundane comments. This eventually evolved into a more personal project, as she looked for tweets which mirrored her own opinions and thoughts, but were well-executed by the author. “100 Tweets” also records pockets of time and history in short observations.
Vaughan says that the process “was laborious but satisfying.” She followed a strict formal layout and borrowed artist Gerhard Richter’s method of selecting random colors for his grid paintings. The colors in “100 Tweets” were generated via the website random.org, and no two are alike. Colors were grouped together in tones. The yin to Twitter’s high-tech speed is the yang of hand typesetting, it can be long and slow. All together “100 Tweets” hit over 250 hours on the press.
