Thursday, April 8, 2010
Tadanori Yokoo on Twitter
The way Tadanori Yokoo uses Twitter gives the technology a new dimension. He tweets the way he draws. It's an approach to life/death and meaning/meaninglessneess and the gaps/spaces in-between. He throws his words out as they cross his mind, reaching out to the other reality that is the shadow of death and the faraway universe inhabited by aliens calling out to us in beeps and brush strokes and gasps of a deranged poet. They come and go, lost into cyberspace, our blood, our flashes, our yearnings, our art. They are maybe ignored, cast away, or found and even treasured before being forgotten like grandmothers and mothers and aborted daughters, and they cross like sparkling crystal of stars through the black universe, hurling into consciousness and lives and thoughts and desperate clawing at art by lonely artists and careless carefree tweets.
Kageyama san!, this twitter is entirely in Japanese! :O I can understand very few words and identify very few kanji, do you think if I use a translator it will translate accurately? could you translate one of your favorite tweets from him? I'm interested about what he has to say.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I am not authorized as translator so I don't feel comfortable doing it. But I tried to communicate the gist of his tweets in what I wrote. He is still tweeting a lot, treating it as part of his art, a cyber-manuscript, and his growing number of followers serves as a psychological drive in his perpetual pursuit of the art of the tweet.
ReplyDeleteI never thought that tweeter could be a vehicle of art other than just making announcements.
ReplyDeleteIn Japanese Twitter, many people leave what I would describe as "sayings," sometimes quotes from famous people, like "imitation is never as good as the real thing."
ReplyDeletePeople seek to escape the drudgery of everyday life, and to connect with others, but in what are practically platitudes. Japanese Twitter is filled with technology venture types, as is to be expected. But it is also filled with psychiatrists, therapists and specialists on stree-reduction. But what I find interesting are the artists using the medium as a tool to explore their thoughts. You can say a lot in Japanese in 140-letters especially with a haiku-esque approach.
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