How Bloomsday 2011 Will Dawn

As the curtain rises on Bloomsday 2011 at 8:00 am in Dublin on 16 June, @11ysses is transformed into a Twitter performance space where James Joyce’s Ulysses is recast tweet by tweet in a ceaseless full-day flow. The Brave Cast, standing behind that curtain in single file scattered all around the world, waits for their cue.

The very first tweet is posted. It contains a single character:

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That is the cue for the Brave Cast member who has made the first segment of Ulysses his or her own to begin tweading.  For the next 15 minutes the @11ysses stage is filled with the re:Joycing tweets of this Cast members’ rendition.

After 15 minutes, another single-stroke tweet appears:

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That is the cue for our first tweader to retire from the keyboard and for our Brave Tweader #2 to dive in on the second segment. And so it continues until the final “yes.”

For the audience of this 2011 Bloomsday Tweading, @11ysses presents the talents of Mr. James Joyce and The Brave Cast in one Twitter stream of consciousness, easy to follow and dip into throughout the day, into the night, and for days afterward.

The behind-the-screen magic that will fuse the efforts of The Brave Cast together into @11ysses is an online service called CoTweet. It allows tweeps to collaborate together via Twitter and it’s free (or at least the “standard version” is) at cotweet.com.

If you have already stepped bravely forward to join the @11ysses cast and your profile is proudly displayed on The Brave Cast section of this blog, you will shortly receive an email from me inviting you to our CoTweet rehearsal space. We’ll hold a few brief rehearsals in the next month or so to make sure we all have what we need to make this experiment work and we make sure this crazy technology works to our liking.

If you have NOT yet stepped forward to join this Brave Bleary Band, please do so today without delay.  Simply email me, The Naïve Director (The name’s Steve. How do you do?) at sc11ysses@yahoo.com.  Please include a short statement about you, James Joyce, and/or Twitter and a photo that combined will become your Cast member profile.

Don’t delay. Do it today!