Multiverse on 14th Launches!

Catch us at the opening tonight!

Multiverse on 14th by Katie Parlante and Mimi Yin is a set of three "infinite" poems about 14th Street, composed of random musings, observations, remembrances, rants, and self-conscious disclosures found on Twitter. None of the speakers intended to create a poem together. Instead, we created a space and collaborated for them with a few simple rules.

You can experience Multiverse on the web at multiverse.caketoo.us.

Multiverse is also a projected installation that will take place over three consecutive nights Th, Fri, Sa October 15, 16 and 17 8PM - midnight at the little fountain on the Southwest corner of Union Square Park, transforming the fountain into a temporary well of private thoughts.

Each of the three poems paints a vignette of daily life on 14th Street.

Transit
Walking around Spinners Records makes me think of Henry Rollins
hoping for a good storm
just saw a man walking his turtle

Contemplation
Sept. 9, 2009 @party_pizza, @colinbugbee, @moepet
Relishing relish
eating cheetos
trying to forget what I think I know about art

Aspiration
Sept. 2, 2009 @USSMeghanMcCain, @fuchsiaraskal, @karleysamantha
I desire nothing
without an adventure on it
until we close our eyes for good

The phrases are pulled from the public Twitter feed, from all over the English-speaking world. Yet, they feel appropriate on 14th street. Everyone belongs on 14th street. Every kind of activity belongs on 14th street. And every thought, hope, secret desire and confession belongs on 14th street.

New stanzas are generated every half hour with the latest Twitter data. In that sense, the poems are of "infinite length." This also means that viewers can contribute their own tweets and see them appear in the installation.

Although Multiverse is very much a Twitter project, we wanted to see if we could create something that could stand up on its own, independent of the online data source we’re pulling from; something that could be brought out of the computer screen into the physical world. We are grateful to Art in Odd Places for the opportunity to bring Multiverse to the real live 14th Street!

We will be posting more on how we created the projection and how the website is constructed both here and on our blog.