This week’s reading reminded me of an interesting cultural artifact from the Trump years: Trevor Noah and The Daily Show's “Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.” The “library” consisted of both a published volume and a series of brick-and-mortar pop-up galleries in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City. I’ve linked the site on which you can take a virtual tour of the LA pop-up and have also attached a few screenshots from my own digital wanderings in the virtual gallery space.
What strikes me about this project is that it transcribed internet discourse into spaces of more traditional forms of cultural discourse i.e. libraries, museums, books. During the Trump presidency, it became rather common for formal stances taken by the executive branch to be announced on Twitter before being spoken at the podium of the press secretary. Trump often traversed and confused boundaries between informal and formal, real and unreal, official proclamation and off-hand remark. Though the library is a work of satire, it speaks to the genuine frustration caused by Trump’s unwieldy and prolific tweeting at the time. It also had the potential to offer a kind of salve. The curation and containment of the tweets made them manageable and discrete objects, as opposed to drops indistinguishable from one another in the daily deluge of always inane and often disconcerting Trump tweets. Of course, now that the pop-up exhibits have been dismantled in "real" life and live on in virtual form, the selected tweets, though curated and organized, have returned to the realm of the digital.
https://www.cc.com/info/s0zbw0/trump-twitter-library-los-angeles
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