Event room of the Edith-Ruß-Haus
Exhibition from March 15 to 20, 2011
Tai-Wei Kan, new scholarship holder of the Edith-Ruß-Haus exchange scholarship with the Digital Art Center, Taipei
Online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming more popular every day. Many people use these services to share their activities with friends anytime and anywhere. On the other hand, mobile communication devices are still not enough to actually enable the permanent networking that we are striving for. The Taiwanese artist Tai-Wei Kan takes this discrepancy between virtual aspirations and technical reality as an opportunity to create a situation in his work I Twitter, Therefore I Am, in which every activity is automatically passed on to one’s own community in the Twitter social network.
To do this, he equips everyday objects such as coffee cups or slippers with electronic sensors that communicate with computers via wireless radio links so that their system recognizes the user’s behaviour in this situation. This allows the computer system to “tweet” to the social network on the Internet what you are doing. For example, if you switch off the light, the message “I’m going to bed, good night” may appear automatically. Or the system sends the message “I’m so thirsty, I’ll have a coffee first” when you hold a cup.
In the exhibition situation, participants can share their current behavior with friends worldwide by using the networked objects and pieces of furniture. On the other hand, Twitter users can add Tai-Wei Kan’s Life Twitter as a friend on their own Twitter page and then access and monitor every action in the exhibition space anytime and anywhere.
The ironic setting of configuring every everyday action as worthy of communication refers to the increasing willingness to present oneself on the Internet and to the increase in irrelevant private details that are communicated to the world. At the same time, the installation reflects on the vision of a technologized future that enables total surveillance, even against the will of the user. This no longer seems particularly utopian in view of television formats such as Big Brother, the popularity of social networks and the high willingness to independently shift the boundary between “private” and “public”. In contrast to a dictatorial regime or an abstract “system”, in this case the same people who are being monitored are doing the monitoring.
Tai-Wei Kan’s artwork, which he will realize during his scholarship stay at the Edith Russ House for Media Art, points out that social networks such as Twitter not only change forms of communication but also ways of life and, in addition to broader social and political participation, also prepare the ground for dangerous structures that are only slowly being perceived and recognized by a broader public.