Word

A fax machine that printed the city's voice — every tweet tagged #taksimsenin.

At the 2012 Istanbul Design Biennial, the Herkes İçin Mimarlık (Architecture for All) association exhibited an installation imagining a parallel universe in which Istanbul's residents had a say in their city and its urban transformation projects. Word, made in collaboration with Zeynep Nal, was part of it: a fax machine that printed out visitors' tweets about the Taksim project, posted with the hashtag #taksimsenin (“Taksim is yours”).

The fax machine was produced at Plato Media Lab, with software and automation by Zeynep Nal. Written in Processing on top of the Twitter API, the software continuously watched for the hashtag; whenever it appeared, it collected the message and its author, laid them out as a document and sent it straight to the fax.