SEE VIDEO DOCUMENTATION HERE:
https://vimeo.com/240291975
SEE VIDEO DOCUMENTATION OF 2013 INSTALLATION AT MALMAISON IN GEORGETOWN HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s77p0FVW8Qs&t=13s
Jabbersquawkey is an interactive installation that was exhibited at the kings and istrategylabs party at Malmaison in Georgetown Saturday feb 22. “Jabbersquawkey!!! The Automated Political Gossip Perpetuator”
You are a politician and are the vehicle by which gossip is generated for the media driven rumor-mill. You merely have to be present to begin generating gossip.
The more people you have present in the screen, the more gossip you generate and hence the more diverse the types of gossip generated.
Whether you have been assigned to be the vehicle for Joe Biden, John Boehner, Hillary Clinton, or another celebrity, you will enable and perpetuate the gossip engine. More specifically, when you enter the screen you are assigned a politician. When you are alone, that politician makes comments about him- or herself regarding content collected from online gossip articles or publications in a speech-bubble above their head, and is simultaneously being posted to another twitter account to be read by others. When a second politician enters the gossip from one politician is directed at the other politician in the room also culled from online gossip. In addition to the gossip comment, there is a live real-time twitter feed from one of the politician’s official twitter accounts, displaying one word at a time. When people have stayed in the screen for too long birds, stars and other icons circle around their heads reflecting that you have become dizzy with gossip.
See how many of your friends you can get into the screen. At a certain critical mass, a significant gossip message will be shared that will blow your mind! Also, this character is quite a special one.
The title Jabbersquawkey comes from “Jabberwocky,” a nonsense verse poem written by Lewis Carroll in his 1871 novel
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The book tells of Alice’s adventures within the back-to-front world of a looking glass. In a scene in which she is in conversation with the chess pieces White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realising that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verse on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems, and reads the reflected verse of “Jabberwocky”. She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has walked into, later revealed as a dreamscape.
“Jabberwocky” is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. Its playful, whimsical
language has given us nonsense words and neologisms such as “galumphing” and “chortle”.
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