Twitter Live Art Writing Project, 2012

#WordintheHand is the drawing shed’s Live Art Writing Project using Twitter on the page and in the ether.Between April and June 2012 on Tuesday mornings, the drawing shed, with “…Ask Freda” and guest writers Jacob Sam-La Rose and Dorothy Fryd, ran weekly creative writing sessions at The Arc (St Mary’s CofE Primary School on The Drive, E17). The project was open to all adult residents and no previous  experience of writing or tweeting was necessary. Over the spring and summer months, the group which has since developed into the PeopleLikeUs Collective, met regularly to write together and use Twitter as a creative space to explore, share and riff off each other in the ether.
The  limit of a tweet’s 140 characters proved an invaluable tool in enabling people to take creative risks, while for most this was the first step into tweeting in the ether.  The project  has brought extraordinary results in terms of changes in residents’ relationship with their own and other’s writing, their tolerance and acceptance of cultural difference and their capacity to enter into an imaginative dialogical space with others.
the drawing shed’s interest in using Twitter for Live writing and, following this, for Open Performance, is in pushing the creative boundaries of dialogical art practice led by artists in both public and community spaces, exploring innovative ways to connect communities and to build virtual relationships.
The next phase of the project is currently planned to start again in early 2013.
Project’s origins:
During Summer 2011,  Sally Labern was part of a DIY artist’s professional development project funded by ArtsAdmin, LADA and TextFestival with Natasha Vicars and Mary Patterson; the artists created Dawn Chorus tweeting using a shared ‘score’ to explore Dawn together and the result was some beautiful shared writing! The Twitter writing project is ongoing and a number of ‘tweets’ have been translated into screen printed posters, moving the dialogue ‘from the ether to the page’.
This work has been funded by Arts Council England and the Walthamstow and Chingford Almshouse Charity.