Artist and sometimes Hyperallergic contributor Michelle Vaughan continues to render tweets into letterpress. Her 100 Tweets project was the first to give the quips of the twitteratti some permanence in print but now the queen of the twitter press has created a small series devoted to the dark lord of right-wing news media himself, Rupert Murdoch.
If Murdoch appears to be an odd choice for Vaughan, her choice reveals an aspect of her project that wasn’t apparent in the first series, which is a fascination with how we read into the tweets of others as a form of biography. While some may see Twitter as a graveyard for ideas, Vaughan presents them in a way that feels more like a mirror and — in the case of Murdoch — humanizes the tweeter using only his own words (or his ghost tweeter’s).
“Tweets can reveal surprising sides of an author’s personality,” Vaughan told me over email. “Like everyone else, I have been immersed in the daily reports of the News Corp. hacking for months. Rupert Murdoch opened a Twitter account in December after, what I assume, was probably one of the worst years of his professional career. I think his comments on Twitter tell us more about him, and I wanted to highlight a few that I found quite funny.”
This new series is comprised of five flat cards, each 5 x 7″, and they feel like an ironic thank you card you might get from a friend who works at MSNBC or CNN. But I will admit that there’s nothing quite like getting a healthy dose of schadenfreude in the mail.
Vaughan’s Rupert Murdoch series is available on her website.
