I had not thought of it since Art 101 eons ago, but I was reminded of “The Twittering Machine” by a NYT article on the the Bauhaus exhibit. Crank the machine up, and those ethereal, mechanical birds start to sing their hearts out against a vast, infinite backdrop beyond measure. Klee reveals our vulnerability in small-scale images poised at the brink. Somewhere between nature and the mechanical, between the comic and the tragic, his birds “twitter” with a music that expresses how frail and vulnerable existence is. Or in today’s world, how ephemeral communication is. Perhaps that is the key to why Twittering has become so popular. A way to assert our selfhood in the face of infinity.