Saturday, March 5, 2011

Man Bartlett's #24hClerk

Robert Boyd



From left to right: Nancy Douthey, Brian Piana, Mark Correro, Man Bartlett

I got to see Man Bartlett setting up for his 24 hour performance, #24hClerk, this afternoon at Skydive. The set-up is pretty simple--a computer with a camera, facing a wall with a large piece of white paper on it and a price gun hanging underneath the paper. To the right of the paper and price gun is a chair and table with a typewriter on it. The computer is how Bartlett communicates with his many participants--he reads their tweets and streams out his response (visual and verbal) back to anyone who happens to be watching. Nancy Douthey will be at the typewriter, transcribing at least some of the dreams.




After some final adjustments, Bartlett made sure the rest of us, in an adjacent room, were quiet. Then at 3 pm central, the performance was launched. To prime the pump, those of us in the other room (Skydive's Sasha Dela and Brian Piana, Mark Correro, and I) tweet some dreams to Bartlett. The other dreams start coming in.

 

Bartlett has to kneel down to type and to read the tweets. I suspect this is going to be really uncomfortable after 24 hours. While he's bent down, he reads the dream tweet aloud then ponders how to price it.

 

Once the dream price is settled on, he sets it on the price gun.

 

He places a price sticker on the paper.

 

And then steps back to admire his work.

You can have your dreams priced. Just tweet a dream along with the hashtag #24hClerk. Bartlett is going to be doing this until 3 pm central time, Sunday, March 6.

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