Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film by Masha Tupitsyn

Published by Zero Books, 2011
Perfect bound softcover
188 pages
8.5x5.5 inches

“The 1,200 tweets that constitute Masha Tupitsyn’s Laconia are—each one—an aphorism in a bottle set adrift into the midst of all the other crisscrossing messages that movies and the media universe have spawned and continually and more or less blindly emit. Everything is happening in real time—not recollected in tranquility, but intercepted in passing—even when the messages emanate from the deep past or (perhaps) a future around the next bend. It's a collage of the present moment; a continuous and unyielding dialogue; open-ended and extremely alert to the barrage of signals that has become our home.”—Geoffrey O'Brien

If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count? In today’s surplus world of communication overload and cultural clutter, writer and cultural critic Masha Tupitsyn turns to the media matrix of Twitter to explore the changing ways that we construct and consume narrative. Loosely applying the discerning aphorism—a compressed genre in itself—to a 21st century context, Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film offers meditations on film and popular culture that resonant with laconic meaning and personal insight while getting to the heart of the matter. Inspired by Chris Marker's free-associative film impressions in La Jetèe and Sans Soleil, Laconia is part film diary, part cultural inventory, and part mashup. Pulling from an array of film, popular culture, books, and mainstream media, it offers penetrating critical commentary on an increasingly muddled virtual world. Laconia consists of brick by brick prose, as Tupitsyn thinks in sentences and lines that culminate in an architecture of thinking.