the world's longest novel

#EMPIREFILM is a written record of the first live tweeting of Andy Warhol's "Empire" on Feb. 19, 2011, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Nothing is left out: in #EMPIREFILM we read every tweet made during the screening of this notoriously long film. A typical movie is about two hours; "Empire" consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building in New York City, leaving the moviegoers/tweeters an apparent infinity to fill with observations of the obvious, banal trivia and the frivolous chatter of Manhattan's fabulously bored (punctuated with random tweets by the author). As the story toils on and the hours go by, a sense of the absurd descends upon the crowd as they wait for the famed, fleeting reflection of Warhol in the window. Will the ghost of the Prince of Pop Art ever appear?

#EMPIREFILM is the latest work of literary appropriation by Mark Leach, author of the 17-million-word "Marienbad My Love," the world's longest novel. "What he [Leach] does is the artistic equivalent of running newspaper ads, magazine articles, and tampon covers through a shredder, pouring glue on it, then taking a piss on it and calling that art." - name withheld at request of the commentator

Publication Date: Mar 12 2011

 

#EMPIREFILM by Mark Leach is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.