Cory Arcangel's new book, Working on My Novel was culled from two years of tweets about the same. Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel's new book, Working on My Novel was culled from two years of tweets about the same.
The artist sees the book as a meditation on the act of creation---but also a document of what life's like at our specific moment in time. Cory Arcangel
The artist sees the book as a meditation on the act of creation---but also a document of what life's like at our specific moment in time.
Arcangel gravitated to the ones that made some comment on the world around them, even in some small, seemingly mundane way. "I didn't have a defined criteria," he says of the process. "It's a lot of a 'I know it when I see it.'" Cory Arcangel
Arcangel gravitated to the ones that made some comment on the world around them, even in some small, seemingly mundane way. "I didn't have a defined criteria," he says of the process. "It's a lot of a 'I know it when I see it.'"
"A good tweet has to be able to stand by itself. It has paint a really good picture." Cory Arcangel
"A good tweet has to be able to stand by itself. It has paint a really good picture."
For the last several years, the New York artist has fastidiously tracked the phrase “working on my novel” as used on Twitter. His new book, Working On My Novel , collects hundreds of these tiny declarations of literary intent. It’s a clever conceit, but it’s also something more. Taken together, the messages make for a poignant picture of creativity—and life in general—in age of social media.
The cover. Cory Arcangel
Before the project was a book, it was a Twitter account, and before that, it was a BuzzFeed post. The earliest incarnation arrived in 2009, when Arcangel, a friend of BuzzFeed creator Jonah Peretti’s from their time running in New York’s digital arts scene, was doing a turn as a guest editor on Peretti’s then-new site. Arcangel, whose brilliant software-driven work has established him one of his generation’s most incisive artists, made a post linking to the search results for the phrase “working on my novel” on Twitter. It was a nice bit of juxtaposition: an age-old creative pursuit as it was being expressed on a frenetic new creative medium.
But the idea stuck around, and eventually, Arcangel brought it back as a Twitter account. Every morning he’d wake up, read through the previous day’s tweets that included “working on my novel,” and re-tweet the best ones. “I’d maybe Tweet one out of every four hundred,” he says. “Because they had to be right. By the time it got to the Twitter feed, I’d realized that my eye was a kind of part of it.” A while later, when Penguin asked Arcangel to pitch some ideas for a book, the “working on my novel” project emerged as an obvious fit.
Making a book full of tweets was not as straightforward as it might seem. Since Twitter doesn’t offer a way to search for messages more than a week old, Arcangel had to write a crawler that archived every usage of that exact language. Then he ran it for two years.
“It was kind of a monumental effort,” he says. “But it was really exciting to me to write a book which basically required writing a lot of software.”
When it came time for Arcangel to pick his favorites, he gravitated to the ones that made some comment on the world around them, even in some small, seemingly mundane way. “I didn’t have a defined criteria,” he says of the process. “It’s a lot of a ‘I know it when I see it.’ A good tweet has to be able to stand by itself. It has paint a really good picture. I really like ones that have references to contemporary culture.”
Though his role was largely one of curator, Arcangel thinks the book fits perfectly within his larger body of work. He compared it to his best known project, Super Mario Clouds , a modified version of the iconic game in which Arcangel stripped out the game’s visuals until it just showed a parade of pixelated clouds inching slowly across the blue sky. (Earlier this summer, when a Yahoo tech writer asked a group of respected critics what might be considered the Mona Lisa of the digital art, Super Mario Clouds was the closest they came to a consensus.)
That project, Arcangel says, was about finding the unassuming moments of beauty that often get overlooked in the digital world. “At that time, people weren’t looking at those graphics like that. Those things weren’t considered beautiful.”
In the same way, the book encourages us to look a little more closely at something we’d otherwise ignore. “On one level it’s about people dealing with what it means to be creative,” he says, “But overall, I hope when you read the book you get a sense of what life is like today. And to me, the tweets do have a beauty in them. Because they’re very human.”
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