On January 27th, 2011 Egyptian authorities succeeded in shutting down the country’s international Internet access points in response to growing protests. Over one weekend, a group of programmers developed a platform called Speak2Tweet that would allow Egyptians to post their break-ing news on Twitter via voicemail despite Internet cuts. The result was thousands of heartfelt messages from Egyptians recording their emotions by phone. A few years later the messages are no longer accessible to the public.

Speak2Tweet composed a unique archive of the collective psyche; as the voices disappeared in the depths of cyber-space, this project brings forth the unique narratives and, in turn, connects them once again to the physical realm. Proj-ect Speak2Tweet is both a research project and a growing archive of experimental films that utilizes Speak2Tweet mes-sages prior to the fall of the Mubarak regime on February 11, 2011 and juxtaposes them with the abandoned structures that represent the long-lasting effects of a corrupt dictator-ship. The project interrogates the re-imagining of the urban myth, of visualizing the city from the “personal” perspective through the highly problematic constructs of (un)democratic tools. It explores the emergence of the imagined city from internal monologues and investigates historical narratives via glitches in digital memory. Through the multi-layered spatial relationships, the project attempts to portray the psychology of the urban realm. As the visual archive grows, Project Speak2Tweet changes and transforms into an altered space that mimics the hallucination of the inner voice.