“Democracy isn’t just a Tweet away” [1] comments on the simpliftication and polarisation of political rhetoric and on popular opinions that Twitter and other social media platforms are democratising forces in the 21st century, for example the widely held view that Twitter was a powerful force capable of liberating the Iranian people in the 2009 Iranian elections.

The installation uses a set of collated tweets from political leaders. The tweets are analysed for their word usage and re-synthesised using audio recordings of political speeches. The sound of the ‘audio-tweets’ will be processed so that words which are more commonly used are more audible to visitors to the installation and infrequently used words are highly processed to the point of being unrecognisable, forming a incomprehensible backdrop of vocal-like sounds.

[1] Gedmin, Jeffrey. (2010, April 22). Democracy isn’t just a tweet away. Retrieved from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-04-23-gedmin22_ST_N.htm