"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact." - William S Burroughs
Congressional Lunch is a website that generates fake tweets from real politicians using a Markov chain, a process where random variables are transitioned from one state to another based-on assumptions and probability. All the most recent tweets from each politician's Twitter pages are put into a pool of their own party. From there, tweets are generated and published periodically according to the party they are accredited to. With three screens, the Republican tweets are shifted to the right, the Democratic tweets shifted to the left, and the middle acts as a feed for all of them. Although the tweets are affected by their party, they all utilize the same platform that brings them both together while still being separated.
When viewed in a gallery setting, this piece is to be a three channel installation. On all three monitors will be a maximized browser window and will display the following urls:
- Left: http://congressional-lunch/tile?header=false&party=democratic
- Center: http://congressional-lunch/?header=false
- Right: http://congressional-lunch/tile?header=false&party=republican
A screen-recording of those pages should be created prior to installation in the gallery space. This is to ensure the piece can still be displayed even if the gallery is unable to accommodate the installation requirements. Please note that the fake tweets are generated primarily from real tweets posted in the past week, therefore a video will not represent current events as the project was intended to do. This should only be implemented as a last resort.