Rachel Perry Welty was born in Tokyo in 1962 and has work held in museums and collections all over the world. Her practice’s primary concerns appear to include daily routine, collection and proliferation of objects. Uses a variety of media: sculpture, video, performance, drawing and installation.

Rachel Is… (2010) was a performative and documentary piece where Welty updated her Facebook status every minute of every hour for the duration of a regular day (roughly 16 hours) – the question posed: “What are you doing right now?” and she tried to answer as directly as she could. The purpose was to raise questions about narcissism, voyeurism, privacy, identity and authority as part of our technological contemporary world.

Duration is clearly an important aspect of the work, what she described as a “marathon”. It is also interesting that she creates work that points to the mundane aspects of our everyday life – as this appears to have become a function of Instagram. Social media has evolved in one aspect into a replication of life’s minute experiences.

Welty: “As humans, we spend most of our time engaged in the small moments (whether we tweet or facebook about them or not) and in my project I am trying to get people to notice the things they wouldn’t ordinarily.” This interview was conducted in 2010, in 2020 it seems that social media is making it even more difficult to notice these things.

With my project I want to question why we upload what we do – where the impulse comes from – and why we are willing to let social media disrupt/intervene real experience – Instagram is constantly at the back of our minds when on walks, in galleries, working on artwork, when we come across anything interesting, when on holiday, when sitting about, and so on.

Interviewer: “What was the response to Rachel is? Were people annoyed, interested? Any surprises?”

Welty: “I was very much aware that my day in 60-second increments is not particularly interesting… I was doing it for many reasons, but mostly just to see what would happen.”

This reflects much of my thinking with my stream project on instagram – there were concerns of follower interest or annoyance (I suppose narcissistic) but really they could have been successes of the project. Welty’s artwork here is a great example of what can come from experimentation without intention of answering anything.