On Kawara is not On Twitter
Posted by ben on 27 May 2009 at 11:40 am | Tagged as: conceptual art, net.art
I noticed today (via AFC) that there’s an On Kawara Twitter account which announces “I AM STILL ALIVE #art” every day. Then I noticed that the announcement is made every day at 11:55 AM, and that it is posted via a Perl script (Perl Net::Twitter). As it happens, last night I was flipping through , and I came across On Kawara’s postcard project, in which he sent the time he woke up each day stamped on postcards (this went on for 4 months):
Nov – 1 1969 I got up at 4.28 P.M.
Nov – 2 1969 I got up at 3.13 P.M.
Nov – 3 1969 I got up at 1.15 P.M.
…
Given the personal nature of this work, I figured either this isn’t On Kawara’s Twitter account or he is seriously changing up his working methods. A Google search later, I find the confession:
The conceptual artist On Kawara has 101 followers on twitter at the time of this writing. I have only 20-something. But I am On Kawara on twitter. Or rather, On Kawara on twitter is a Perl script that gets automatically run once a day on a server in a cabinet in my living room. I haven’t done anything to publicize his activities on twitter. All he does is announce, “I AM STILL ALIVE” once a day. He doesn’t follow anyone. Yet, somehow, it seeped out into the twitter community. The “Perl Net::Twitter” client name should be a dead give away.
The interesting thing about this (and my original reason for launching it) is that it blatantly negates the whole idea behind On Kawara’s “I AM STILL ALIVE” messages. Whereas those did indeed confirm that he was still alive, this doesn’t. It’s an automated process that he doesn’t even control. Were he to die, he would continue to announce “I AM STILL ALIVE”, everday, on twitter. So it really does two things; by falsely confirming that he is alive, it casts doubt on the issue but it also keeps the notion of him actively announcing that he is alive, alive.
No. The photography is not mine. It’s Traci Johnson’s a health 19 years old woman who hanged herself at Eli-Lilly’s facilities during Cymbalta’s clinical trials. The main reason why I’ve created this blog is to introduce myself to many people who are concerned with mental health. Yep! This subject came into my life for two reasons: first a very close person after one year struggling with depression had to be hospitalized because of a manic episode. All of the philosophy, psychology, all knowledge I had acquired went down to the drain. After that it was me who was misdiagnosed and put into drugs. Here I’m trying to join the brave people who are trying hard to make some sense. How could you think it was me on this photography? You know that I’m 50 years old.
I find this weirdly touching.
haha. me likey!
If you get into these spaces [non-ordinary states of consciousness] at all, you must forget about them when you come back. You must forget you’re omnipotent and omniscient and take the game seriously so you’ll engage in sex, have children, and participate in the whole human scenario. When you come back from a deep tank session — or a coma or psychosis — there’s always this extraterrestrial feeling. You have to read the directions in the glove compartment so you can run the human vehicle once more.
All those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people. Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways. Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same thing, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive – you have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder.
General Productions based this independent film on Lewis Carrolls’ original book, which portrays a much darker story than most movie-makers care to produce
Any relation to this Theresa Duncan or is the username a tribute of some kind?