@hg47's Blog: The Tweet & The TakeAway - Posts Tagged "140art"

In Feb 2010 I found a hack to do minimalist #TwitterArt …Twitter just shut down my exploit. Never date & break-up with a Twitter Admin!

Guy Vincent - https://twitter.com/Guy_Vincent - discovered sometime early in 2010 an em-width space, that when you put a bunch of them together, Twitter would treat as a word, meaning the group of spaces wouldn't break. This made it possible for a tweet to be several lines high with just a few visible characters.

Then I discovered that I could start a line with a hard-space, but that the non-breaking space could not be copy/pasted, but had to be entered into the composition window by the Alt-0160 code. What I hadn't appreciated until recently was that this procedure made my antics on Twitter difficult to reverse engineer. Anyone who copy/pasted my tweets trying to steal them, would get non-functional tweets, because Twitter treats the hard space when pasted as a soft space.

Anyway, we're in a new era. Twitter's recent upgrade went to an active composition window, that changes a lot of things, and the hard space no longer functions (or if it does, I haven't found a way to use it yet). I found a temporary work-around of limited value. I don't really understand the new composition window; but I shouldn't feel bad, different browsers don't seem to understand it too well either; the rendering differences between Firefox & Chrome just got a lot more varied. Call me paranoid, but I suspect Twitter will soon shut-down my work-around. Cheers! @hg47

Links to my early #TwitterArt:

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/twit...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/mini...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/worl...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/art-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/cate...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/in-t...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-t...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/obam...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/deve...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/play...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/turb...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-...

http://hg47.blogspot.com/2013/01/pre-...

Artists only get paid if they go viral.

Sometimes not even then.

My personal take on great artists and writers is that they do it WRONG over and over until their personal Wrongness gets noticed, and proclaimed a New Form of Right. That's just my personal take.

I have no clue how to turn your personal Wrongness into a new form of Right; but I did go viral once.

1306 days ago, I tweeted a Twitter Art sequence of #140art tweets of an airplane crashing into the Twin Towers. The next day I tweeted the same sequence without the hashtag.

Within a 24-hour period I was retweeted more than 10,000 times. One of the tweets got more than 4,500 retweets.

That was my moment of viral infamy.

For me, my Art and Music and Writing has been more about patience than skill. Endurance is possibly more important than both of them together.

@hg47