1stfans Twitter Art Feed Artist for April 2010: Joanie Gagnon San Chirico
After a month of staff tweets (feel free to provide feedback below!), Shelley and I have a great few months of artists tweets lined up for 1stfans, beginning this month with Joanie San Chirico. I continue to be surprised by just how much variety there has been among the different projects that we’ve hosted on the Twitter Art Feed over the last 14 months. That being said, one theme that seems to come up again and again is the idea of twitter as a place to explore public versus private identities. On twitter—as on any social network—there is a tremendous variance in the amount of personal information that people reveal about themselves.
From Joanie’s Abandoned series on Flickr.
Joanie’s project for the feed captures the insecurity, the secrecy, and the fleeting nature of twitter. Here, in her own words, is Joanie’s project for the month of April:
…the right to remain silent
My proposal is to engage the silent members of 1stfans. I will be DM’ing them using the 1stfans feed on Twitter to ask them to tell me one thing about themselves, ranging from the mundane to the fascinating. Participants can then choose to be anonymous, use their first name, initials, or full name. I will also ask them if they want to be revealed in the final essay that I’ll write at the end of the project, which will subsequently be posted on my blog.
Although our computers “talk” to each other all day long, social media allows users to remain faceless and invisible at times. Out of 200+ 1stfans members listed, only 20 or so participate in the 1stfans Twitter feed every month.
I’d like to change that.
Since this is an experiment, and these silent 1stfans may choose to remain so, I may have to improvise and fabricate facts about imaginary people. The trick will be for readers to figure out which are real and which tweets are not. The concept explores the idea of perceived vs. real identity and what it means—can we make ourselves more than we are?
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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.
