SubTweets

“Subtweeting” is the Internet equivalent of talking about someone behind their back. On Twitter, subtweeting has been the source of many public arguments amongst everyday people, celebrities, organizations and even politicians. The SubTweets project parodies the controversial act of subtweeting by giving a new voice to submarine sandwiches. In this project, submarine sandwiches are weighed on a digital scale, causing the publication of a tweet—or more accurately, a ‘sub tweet’. SubTweets was developed by School of Art undergraduate Elizabeth Agyemang as part of a class project for Prof. Golan Levin. and was created with the support of Microgrant #2014-037 from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier.

The SubTweets project seeks to generate a conversation about how people communicate in the modern digital world, and to to comment on this culture through humor and food. Increasingly, when social and personal tensions arise, people turn to forums like Twitter to vent their frustration and anger. However, rather than resolving such issues, subtweeting instead heightens them, resulting in rage wars and twitter battles. SubTweets looks

In an installation setting, participants can weigh various sandwiches on a digital scale and, depending on the weight and a list of properties stored in the computer, Agyemang’s program will ‘recognize’ the type of sub and will generate and publish an appropriate subtweet. The SubTweets project was created with a DYMO serial control scale, Processing, and the Temboo Twitter API.