Newspaper Blackout

This is like a lot of my blackout poems, with one difference: it was made live, with the help of an audience using Twitter’s new livestreaming app, Periscope. (Here’s another one, and here’s something I wrote about how my friend Wendy is using the app.)   

My rig if anybody’s interested

old gooseneck desktop mic stand

gorillapod

glif

old iphone 4

First we selected a section from today’s paper: 

Then I selected an article and a window of text, and people messaged me snippets of text to circle: 

Then we found a little story that read “later, after successfully defending her robot”:

But then, because I’m sort of a control freak, I saw the text “what it’s like” and decided to connect it to the word robot, and came up with a new sequence: 

Until finally, it turned into this: 

It was pretty fun, but it took a whopping 28 minutes. (If you have the Periscope app, you can watch it all here for the next 23 hours or so.)

Or, I shortened it to a 15 second timelapse:

A video posted by Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) on Apr 2, 2015 at 2:03pm PDT

I’ll probably make another one tomorrow afternoon, so follow me on Twitter to get notified when it’s time to join in: @austinkleon