I don’t remember if I followed An or if she followed me, but I’m sure it had something to do with the Brooklyn Museum.
And I was excited to find out that she was to be the first artist featured on the Brooklyn Museum’s 1stfans Twitter Art Feed. I was excited because I had gotten to know An’s work a little, through her witty tweets, and her blog, thatwaszen.
An Xiao studies the emerging 21st century culture, as manifest in cities, nature and individuals, through the lens of eastern and western philosophical theories. In her photography and digital media, she blends Zen aesthetics and modern photographic techniques to inform her approach. Her work has appeared with publications and galleries internationally and throughout the New York City and Los Angeles
areas.
For the 1stfans twitter project, An used Morse code to tweet the minutiae that has become ubiquitous on twitter. The juxtaposition highlighted the similarities and differences between these intentionally brief forms of instantaneous communication.
When her month-long twitter project was over, I asked An, via email, how it went, and she very kindly took time from her hectic schedule to answer.
How did it come about that you became the first 1stfans featured artist?
Before the opportunity came up, had you already been thinking about the relationship between Morse code and the telegram, and modern messaging tools like twitter?
Part of this, I think, is that microblogging media like Facebook status feeds and Twitter represent such a broad technological evolution even within my own lifetime. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, I kept in touch with my grandmother in the Philippines via
air mail, as the phone was too expensive. We soon embraced fax machines and email, and by the end of her life, we were video chatting with each other. As mindblowing as it was for me, I couldn't help but imagine how incredible it was for her, having been born in the early 20th century.
So when I started Twitter, I was already thinking about the evolution of instant communications, and I was making connections between the brevity of Twitter and the brevity of telegrams, even though the latter were mainly used for issues of great importance, rather than declarations of our eating habits.
Do you call your 1stfans project poetry? Conceptual art? Does it matter?
What was interesting, though, was how the project evolved. Although I expected a few @replies, I didn't expect as many as I actually received. They were so creative, in fact, that I retweeted most of them, so their responses would become a part of the @1stfans feed and thus shared with other members. The project evolved, then, from a purely conceptual piece into an interactive, collaborative performance piece, all carried out over the Internet.
How does your project with twitter and Morse code relate to your larger body of work? How about your @thatwaszen identity on twitter?
One of my areas of artistic exploration is in concepts of identity through the lens of Zen, which focuses a good deal on the nature of self and how the self is expressed. What I find so interesting about the evolution of social media is that they allow for a new expression and layer of self, a self that is at once public and accessible to a potential audience of millions, but also highly-controlled and as deliberate as the user chooses. This public, branded self was once reserved for politicians and celebrities, but now anyone with a computer can maintain it. I'm fascinated by how the widespread adoption of this kind of identity is influencing our larger society and how we think of ourselves in day to day life. By looking at the minutiae we choose to broadcast via microblogging media, I hoped to shed light on one aspect of this new, digital identity.
My @thatwaszen identity serves more as a scrapbook, a cooking ground of ideas and thoughts that may or may not eventually make their way into larger art projects or blog posts. In many ways, it's an extension of my creative process, and I welcome the dialogue that comes out of it.
..........................................................
Read Part 2 of my interview with An Xiao.
..........................................................
She blogs online at http://thatwaszen.blogspot.com and tweets at @thatwaszen. Her work can be found at http://www.anxiaostudio.com.
In this video, An discusses her concept for the 1stfans twitter feed.
..........................................................
More:
Photo: An Xiao in front of Samuel Morse's painting of Jonas Platt, at the Brooklyn Museum. More about the painting here and here.
Comments