We had close to 1800 tweets in 30 minutes – that’s about a tweet a second – with topics and threads ranging from love or curiosity to fear or snark. We’re in the process of preparing our transmission now, as well as analyzing our collection of messages – both of which will be posted, along with images of the performance and a follow-up video, before the end of 2012. In the interim, the Daily Dot has published a lovely review of the live event: Tweets in Space event blasts off without a hitch

With our fundraising campaign over and our licensing with National Geographic set, the Tweets in Space team can now announce that we will be working with Deep Space Communications in order to send your Twitter conversations towards GJ667Cc! We look forward to working with them on the project.

The Tweets in Space team (Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern) has some very exciting news! Shortly after our flurry of press — including coverage in Scientific American, New York Daily News, Time.com, Forbes.com, Daily Mail, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, CNET, BBC and many others — we were contacted by National Geographic about a similar project they are working on, in order to promote their new television series, Chasing UFOs. We’ve now partnered with them to create two mutually appreciative events.

National Geographic will be collecting tweets tagged #ChasingUFOs within an 8-hour window on June 29th, and broadcasting them into deep space. To do this, they are licensing our custom Twitter software – making Tweets in Space a partner in their project, and simultaneously helping us achieve the financial goal for our own transmission.

And Tweets in Space will continue as planned. On September 21st between 8:30-9PM Mountain Time, all tweets tagged with #tweetsinspace will be projected as a live animation at the Balloon Museum during the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in New Mexico. This is a purposefully short performance event, where participants are encouraged to respond in real-time to each other’s messages, creating a potent conversation about life and society for transmission.

Those at home can participate by logging onto tweetsinspace.org or by using any number of Twitter Apps, such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. We will beam the #tweetsinspace dialog in full towards GJ667Cc: the closest and most likely exoplanet that might support human-like, biological life.

We see these two projects as reciprocally beneficial – two conceptual frames, two performances, two transmissions, and two different destinations. And we’re very, very excited to be working with National Geographic. With their help, we’re much closer to our fundraising goal. We’ve almost got transmission covered, and are now working on travel costs, admin, and development. Right now, we are looking for an additional $2500 to make this happen – so our new goal on Rockethub is $5700 before 25 June, at which point we will top up to our goal with moneys paid from our National Geographic licensing. Every little bit helps, and we have really, really cool perks and prizes for our sponsors. Please take a look, and consider making a donation – time runs out on Monday the 25th.  http://rkthb.co/7291

Thank you!
Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern
http://rkthb.co/7291

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