Zein und Tweet
Zein und Tweet
Medium: Digital
This is a personal piece representing my feelings about using the “social-streaming” service Twitter.
The concept came to me while I was in Redmond at Microsoft HQ at an annual event they hold. I was struck by those attendees who spent all their time on twitter, pownce, and facebook, constantly hitting reload, and updating each service. I guess it was an event held by MS, and some of the presentation might have bored some people. But, I was wondering about how they constructed their social identity from these tweets, and how their followers constructed their identities. So, being quite literal, I imagined their bodies becoming tweets.
That gave me an idea for a story about a guy who has a sort of aphasia, or some sort of self/other identity problem that makes it difficult to tell people apart or even to tell when someone is not himself. He can communicate for a while using Twitter. There’s a stalker, obviously. There’s also all sorts of silly puns about someone going by the twitter username of Know_Wun, just so I can use the polyphemus gimmick you see in this painting.
The original painting was titled I Tweet Therefore I Am, but, after I started to re-read Being and Time, I decided to change the name.
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