“I was visiting the Bay Area and they invited me over, and they arranged for me to get a bigger feed of tweets” - the 20 percent “gardenhose” feed, which ususally requires payment but is given to the Pentametron project, which generates no revenue, for free. Word began to spread about what he was doing, and eventually Twitter heard about it, too. “It’s a way for developers to test out Twitter software, but you could sign up to use it for free, so I did.”Īfter that, he wrote a program to search for tweets that were written in iambic pentameter (10 beats to the line in a heartbeat rhythm), by referencing every word in each tweet received against the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, an online resource produced by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science that identifies the stresses in words. “Last year I was looking at the Twitter API and I could see that you could sign up for a feed for 1 percent out of every 100 tweets,” he recalls of his discovery of Twitter’s so-called “ Spritzer” data API. “I’ve been a nerd since I was a kid,” says New York-based Bhatnagar, who was raised in San Francisco but in a family that had nothing to do with tech and Silicon Valley. Earlier in his life, he used to work for a computer gaming company. “The results were silly and interesting,” he said.įor the next evolution, which became Pentametron, Bhatnagar tapped his interest in programming.
A version of that was eventually used for a project for the Brooklyn Museum - this time with tweets, but still with manual manipulation by Bhatnagar. The earliest of these “network experiments,” as he calls them, was 20 years ago, when he asked different people to each contribute a line to a sonnet - in a hat-tip to the surrealist’s exquisite corpse games.
Ranjit Bhatnagar, the conceptual artist behind Pentametron, tells me the project was borne out of work he had already been doing with collaborative poetry. The end result is a little like when you are in a crowded room and overhear a sudden voice saying something above the din. I don't deserve a boyfriend anyway.- garrett January 9, 2013
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