‘#gibberese’ is a dialogue across oceans. It’s a dialogue of land, fauna (especially birds), and writers who have mostly never met one another. As a component of a rawlings’ 2012 Arts Queensland Poetry Residency and subsequent legacy item Gibber, over twenty writers from Australia, Canada and the USA utilised Twitter to live-generate an exquisite corpse over the span of one hour. This was simultaneously projected during a performance at the Queensland Poetry Festival in August 2012. Post-performance, Twitter’s robots (curiously all assigned young female personas) extended ‘#gibberese’ by recycling the tweets written by the poets. The exquisite corpse itself was accessible via Twitter for a few days after the event occurred. For those readers familiar with Twitter, you’ll understand the enthusiasm that this project brought as the hashtag #gibberese trended (meaning it was promoted to front-page popularity given the frequency of its usage on the social media site) for a period of time during and after the event.
This manifestation finds hundreds of ‘#gibberese’ tweets cycling randomly; any entry into the world of ‘#gibberese’ will be unique given the random occurrence of the texts.
‘#gibberese’ was co-created by a rawlings, Ray Hsu (Canada), david stavanger (Australia), Emily XYZ (USA), Kent MacCarter (Australia), Katie Fedosenko (Australia), Julie Beveridge (Australia), Craig Dodman (Canada), Carmel Purkis (Canada), Christine Leclerc (Canada), Angela Szczepaniak (Canada), Angela Hibbs (Canada), Elee Kraljii Gardiner (Canada), Lainna Lane (Canada), Sarah Gory (Australia), Michael Christopher Holmes (Canada), Sonnet L’Abbe (Canada), Jamie Popowich (Canada), John Back (Australia), Tim Sinclair (Australia), Norma Lundberg (Canada), and Nikki Reimer (Canada).
