Several of the exhibits in the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s upcoming Gallery Crawl were constructed using the latest technological advances, like the 30 human-sized interactive robots in the Wood Street Galleries’ “Hysterical Machines.”However, one artistic attraction rewinds technology all the way back to typewriters.The TypewriterGirls, a literary and performance art troupe, will be “attempting revolution” this Friday with their collaborative performance at one of the 22 venues in Downtown Pittsburgh’s Cultural District offering free admission to the public for exhibitions of visual art, dance, music and more.When the group’s founders, Margaret Bashaar and Crystal Hoffman, lived in an artists’ community at a “haunted hotel in the middle of a dead coal-mining town” after graduating college, the two came to be referred to as “those typewriter girls” as sort of a “derogatory term,” meaning “they don’t really talk to anyone; they just sit there with their typewriters.”However, after researching their newfound nickname, Bashaar and Hoffman, now both 26 years old, found that in the late Victorian Era, the “typewriter girls” were the “new women” who were very often young, independent and aspiring writers publishing “novel after novel” to the point that men would use female pseudonyms. The duo quoted, filling in each other’s blanks, Rudyard Kipling’s complaint about these women: “What is one to say to a young lady … who earns her own bread and slings out-of-the-way quotations at your head? That one falls in love with her goes without saying; but that is not enough. A mission should be established.”Kipling’s protest inspired the girls to create a mission of their own.The TypewriterGirls, who began performing officially in late 2006, strive to personify the French poet Comte de Lautreamont’s creed, “poetry must be made by all.”According to Hoffman, each member of the audience of a  typical TypewriterGirls’ “variety show, cabaret-style” performance can expect an evening of poetry readings, scripted and improvised comedy sketches, circus acrobatics, magic tricks, fire breathing and burlesque dancing.They can also expect to become a part of it all.With regard to their namesake, the troupe incorporates typewriters into their show from the very beginning. Bashaar explained immediately after arrival, each audience member will encounter a typewriter, usually manned by Bashaar’s mother because “nobody knows how to use those things anymore.” Each person is asked to compose a single line of poetry without reading what was written before his or her contribution to partake in a Surrealist writing game called “Exquisite Corpse,” which envelops the audience in the performance through their words as soon as they set foot in the venue. “It’s using the concept of the collective unconscious, believing that we, just by the nature of all being in the same place and being together as people, will create a poem from seemingly completely unrelated writing,” Bashaar said in the JVH Auditorium.The “exquisite corpse” is usually written into the show’s script as the culmination. It somehow serves as a resolution or solves the conflict of the entire show, Hoffman said.Audience involvement does not end there, however, and actually escalates. Improvised comedy sketches like the game “Poets,” which asks four people to choose a character, or “persona,” to imitate. Then, according to Hoffman, the audience chooses a topic to inspire each of the four to create “a poem, a rant, a speech or a series of guttural noises” about, while staying in character.”We’ve had a whale and a whale song,” Hoffman said. “Technically, picking inanimate objects is cheating a little bit, but it was really hilarious.””We’ve had two Satans up on stage at the same time; [I’m] not sure what that says about that venue,” Bashaar joked.To compose their performances, the TypewriterGirls work with dance troupes, like the burlesque-style Bridge City Bombshells or The Pillow Project and circus performers like Dave Doyle, who has done straitjacket routines, acrobatics, fire breathing and even balances items on his face during the unfortunate occurrence of “technical difficulties.””He’s great to have around,” Hoffman said. “He can balance the microphone on his face, or a chair, or a barstool.””Or a desk on his chin,” Bashaar added.However, the TypewriterGirls’ performances are not exclusively about the entertainment. They have worked with a variety of non-profit and social justice organizations such as Planned Parenthood, Climate Ground Zero, The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council and The Books for Prisoners Campaign.Furthermore, many of the central themes of their shows are raisie awareness of social or environmental issues, like the Marcellus Shale controversy, that grip the Pittsburgh community. “Right now we’re really not heading in a very positive direction on this planet as human beings,” Bashaar said. “I don’t want to leave a mess to my child. It really hurts me seeing what we’re doing to the planet, what we’re doing to each other… So, part of what I’m trying to achieve through TypewriterGirls is to [take] a stand about important things.”Hoffman aligns with the Surrealists in the belief that “art is one of the only outlets for changing the way that people think and the way that they view the world and the possibilities that they see within it.””Poetry, at its very root, is considered to be this magical thing,” Bashaar said. “It’s something that has a very powerful healing property. It’s something that cures people … It brings the rain.”The TypewriterGirls will hold three performances on Friday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Trust Arts Education Center’s Peirce Studio, at 805/807 Liberty Avenue, using the intermissions between shows to compose personalized poems for audience members with musical accompaniment.